ANTI- INTELLECTUALIS M IN AMERICAN LIFE

A-I.I.A.L.

A. A K

THE American intellectual has usually
been regarded with considerable suspi
cion or resentment by his countrymen,
and in our own times the old matter-of-
fact designation of him as the "highbrow"
has been succeeded by the more derisive
"egghead/ In this stimulating book, a
Pulitzer Prize-winning historian uses the
idea of anti-intellectualism as a device for
looking at several of the less attractive as
pects of American life.

This is not a formal history of a single
idea, but rather an extended personal es
say which explores various features of
the American character. Mr. Hofstadter
deals, in turn, with the peculiarly dismal
anti-intellectual climate of the 1 950*8; with
the evangelical religious movements from
the Great Awakening to Billy Graham;
with the decline of the educated gentle
man in American politics before the era
of "the expert"; with the insistent ideal of
practicality among American business
men; and with anti-intellectualism in edu
cationthe absurdities of life-adjustment
theory and the uses and misuses of John
Dewey, His concern is not merely to por
tray the scorners of intellect in American
life, but to say something about what the
intellectual is, and can be, as a force in a
democratic society,

JA< KJ I IH SKiN BY Ml Kill K t H, JOHNSON

FEB 1 8 1973
A\ ?M 8 1978"

148 UUI44 1260

j JAN 1 3
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| 2 5 1989

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OTHER BOOKS BY

Richard Hofstadter

American Higher Education: A Documentary History
(WITH WILSON SMITH)

(1961)
The American Republic

(WITH DANIEL AARON AND WILLIAM MILLER)
(1959)

Great Issues in American History

(1958)

The United States

(WITH DANIEL AARON AND WILLIAM MILLER)
(1957)

The Age of Reform

The Development of Academic Freedom in the United States
(WITH WALTER P. METZGER)

(1955)

The Development and Scope of Higher Education

in the United States
(WITH c. BE wirr HARDY)

The American Political Tradition

(1948)

Social Darwinism in American Thought

Anti-intellectualism

I N

AMERICAN LIFE

Anti-intellectualism

IN

AM ERIC AN LIFE

B Y

RICHARD HOFSTADTER

NEW YORK ALFRED A. KNOPF

1963

L. C. catalog card number: 6314086

THIS IS A BORZOI BOOK
PUBLISHED BY ALFRED A. KNOPF, INC.

Copyright 19621, 1963 by RICHARD HOFSTADTBR. All
rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced
in any form without permission in writing from the pub
lisher, except by a reviewer, who may quote brief passages
in a review to be printed in a magazine or newspaper.
Manufactured in the United States of America, and dis
tributed by Random House, Inc, Published simultaneously
in Toronto, Canada, by Random House
of Canada, Limited*

FIBS T EDITION

Chapter 7 appeared in somewhat different form as * "Ideal
ists and Professors and Sore-heads*: The Genteel Reform
ers" in the Columbia University Forum. Chapter 14 ap
peared in somewhat different form as "The Child and the
World" in Daedalw.

T O

E. A. H.

1888-1962

PREFATORY NOTE

w

T THA:

HAT is ordinarily done in prefaces I have tried to do in my
first two chapters, which explain the origin and the intent of this book,
as well as its central terms. But one thing should be particularly clear
at the beginning: what I have done is merely to use the idea o anti-
intellectualism as a device for looking at various aspects, hardly the
most appealing, of American society and culture. Despite the fringes
of documentation on many of its pages, this work is by no means
a formal history but largely a personal book, whose factual details
are organized and dominated by my views. The theme itself has been
developed in a manner that is by choice rather impulsive and by
necessity only fragmentary.

If one is to look at a society like ours from its nether end, so to speak,
through scores of consecutive pages, one must resolve to risk wound
ing the national amour-propre, although this can only divert attention
from the business at hand, which is to shed a little light on our cul
tural problems. One must resolve still more firmly to run some slight
risk of encouraging the canting and self-righteous anti-Americanism
that in Europe today so commonly masquerades as well-informed
criticism of this country. For all their bragging and their hypersensitiv-
ity, Americans are, if not the most self-critical, at least the most anx
iously self-conscious people in the world, forever concerned about the
inadequacy of something or other their national morality, their na
tional culture, their national purpose. This very uncertainty has given
their intellectuals a critical function of special interest. The appropria
tion of some of this self-criticism by foreign ideologues for purposes

PREFATORY NOTE viii

that go beyond its original scope or intention is an inevitable
But the possibility that a sound enterprise in self-correction
overheard and misused is the poorest of reasons for suspen
On this count I admire the spirit of Emerson, who wrote:
honestly state the facts. Our America has a bad name for suf
ness. Great men, great nations, have not been boasters and b
but perceivers of the terror of life, and have manned thems<
face it."

R.

CONTENTS

PART I : INTRODUCTION

CHAPTER i Anti-intellectualism in Our Time 3

2, On the Unpopularity of Intellect 24

PART II : THE RELIGION OF THE HEART

3 The Evangelical Spirit 55

4 Evangelicalism and the Revivalists 81

5 The Revolt against Modernity 117

PART HI : THE POLITICS OF DEMOCRACY

6 The Decline of the Gentleman 145

7 The Fate of the Reformer 172

8 The Rise of the Expert 197

PART IV I THE PRACTICAL CULTURE

9 Business and Intellect 5233

10 Self-Help and Spiritual Technology 253

11 Variations on a Theme

PART V : EDUCATION IN A DEMOCRACY

12 The School and the Teacher 299

13 The Road to Life Adjustment 32-3

14 The Child and the World 359

PART VI : CONCLUSION

15 The Intellectual: Alienation and Conformity 393
Acknowledgments 433
INDEX follows page 434

PART i

Introduction

3 ]

CHAPTER I

Anti-intellectualism
in Our Time

A,

ALTHOUGH this book deals mainly with certain aspects of the re
moter American past, it was conceived in response to the^political and
Intellectual conrliHrms of th.fi 1 950*3. During that decade the term anti-
inteUectualism, only rarely heard before, became a familiar part of our
national vocabulary of self -recrimination and intramural abuse. In the
past, American intellectuals were often discouraged or embittered by
the national disrespect for mind, but it is hard to recall a time when
large numbers of people outside the intellectual community shared
their concern, or when self-criticism on this count took on the character
of a nation-wide movement.

Primarily it was McCarthyism which, aroused the f ear that the critical
mind was at a ruinou$ discount in this country. Of course, intellectuals
were not the only targets of McCarthy s constant detonations he was
after bigger game but intellectuals were in the line of fire, and it
seemed to give special rejoicing to his followers when they were
hit. Hjs sorties against intellectuals and universities were emulated
throughout the country by a host of less exalted inquisitors. Then, in
the atmosphere of fervent malice and humorless imbecility stirred up
by McCarthy s barrage of accusations, the campaign of_iQSg drama-
between iij^ellect and

candidates. On one side was Adlai Stevenson, a politician of uncom
mon mind and style, whose appeal to intellectuals overshadowed any
thing in recent history. On the other was Dwight D. Eisenhower,

INTRODUCTION 4

conventional in mind, relatively inarticulate, harnessed to the unpalat
able Nixon, and waging a campaign whose tone seemed to be set less
by the general himself than by his running mate and the McCarthyite
wing of his party.

Eisenhower s decisive victory was taken both by the intellectuals

themselves and by their critics as a measure of their repudiation by

America. Time, the weekly magazine of opinion, shook its head in an

unconvincing imitation of concern. Eisenhower s victory, it said, "dis

closes an alarming fact long suspected: there is a wide and unhealthy

gap between the American intellectuals and the people/ Arthur

Schlesinger, Jr., in a mordant protest written soon after the election,

found the intellectual "in a situation he has not known for a genera

tion." After twenty years of Democratic rule, during which the in

tellectual had been in the main understood and respected, business

had come back into power, bringing with it "the vulgarization which

has been the almost invariable consequence of business supremacy."

Now the intellectual, dismissed as an "egghead/* an oddity, would be

governed by a party which had little use for or understanding of him,

and would be made the scapegoat for everything from the income tax

to the attack on Pearl Harbor. "Anti-intcllectualism/ Schlesinger re

marked, "has long been the anti-Semitism of the businessman, , .

The intellectual ... is on the run today in American society." *

All this seemed to be amply justified when the new administration
got under way. The replacement* jn^ Stevenson s phrase, of the New
Dealers by^tte^cajr dealers seemed to make final th^ repudiation gf
intellectuals and th^ir j/alues they had already been overshadowed
by the courthouse politicians of the Truman years. The country was
now treated to Charles E* Wilson s sallies at pure research, to stories
about Eisenhower s fondness for Western fiction as reading matter, and
to his definition of an intellectual as a wordy and pretentious man.
But during the Ejgenhower administration the national moodjreac&ed
a turning point: the McCarthyite rage, confronted by a Republican
president, burned itself out; the senator from Wisconsin isolated him
self, was censured, and deflated. Finally, in 1952^-^^^
Sputnik by the_Sovic^ jpreeip|tated one of Jthose^
self-conscious national

prone. The Sputnik was more than a shock to American national
vanity; it brought an immense amount of attention to bear on the

1 Arthur Schlesinger, Jr.: "The Highbrow in Politics/ Partisan Review > Vol. XX
( March-April 1953), pp. i6a~5; Time is quoted here, p. 159.

5 Anti-intellectualism in Our Time

consequences of anti-intellectualism in the school system and in Ameri
can life at large. Suddenly the national distaste for intellect appeared
to be not just a disgrace but a hazard to survival. After assuming for
some years that its main concern with teachers was to examine them
for disloyalty, the nation now began to worry about their low salaries.
Scientists, who had been saying for years that the growing obsession
with security was demoralizing to research, suddenly found receptive
listeners. Cries of protest against the slackness of American education,
hitherto raised only by a small number of educational critics, were
now taken up by television, mass magazines, businessmen, scientists,
politicians, admirals, and university presidents, and soon swelled into
a national chorus of self-reproach. Of course, all this did not immedi
ately cause the vigilante mind to disappear, nor did it disperse anti-
intellectualism as a force in American life; even in the sphere most
immediately affected, that of education, the ruling passion of the
public seemed to be for producing more Sputniks, not for developing
more intellect, and some of the new rhetoric about education almost
suggested that gifted children were to be regarded as resources in the
cold war. But the atmosphere did change notably. In 1952 onlyjntellec-
tuals seemed muc^h disturbed by the specter of anti-intellectualism;
by 1958 the idea that this might be an important and even a dangerous
national f ailing was pergu^sive tq mosF^ people.

Today it is possible to look at the political culture of the igso s with
some detachment. If there was then a tendency to see in Mc-
Carthyism, and even in the Eisenhower administration, some apoca
lypse for intellectuals in public life, it is no longer possible, now that
Washington has again become so hospitable to Harvard professors and
ex-Rhodes scholars. If there was a suspicion that intellect had become
a hopeless obstacle to success in politics or administration, it must
surely have been put to rest by the new President s obvious interest in
ideas and respect for intellectuals, his ceremonial gestures to make
that respect manifest in affairs of state, his pleasure in the company
and advice of men of intellectual power, and above all by the long,
careful search for distinguished talents with which his administration
began. On the other hand, if there had ever been an excessive con
fidence that the recruitment of such talents would altogether trans
form the conduct of our affairs, time has surely brought its inevitable
disenchantment. We have now reached a point at which intellectuals
can discuss anti-intellectualism without exaggerated partisanship or
self-pity.

INTRODUCTION

The political ferment and educational controversy of the 1950*3
made the term anti-intellectual a central epithet in American self-
evaluation; it has slipped unobtrusively into our usage without much
definition and is commonly used to describe a variety of unwel
come phenomena. Those who have suddenly become aware of it often
assume that anti-intellectualism is a new force in this or that area of
life, and that, being a product of recent conditions, it may be expected
to grow to overwhelming proportions. (American intellectuals have a
lamentably thin sense of history; and modern man has lived so long un
der the shadow of some kind of apocalypse or other that intellectuals
have come to look upon even the lesser eddies of social change as
though they were tidal waves. ) But to students of Americana the anti-
intellectual note so commonly struck during the 1950*3 sounded not new
at all, but rather familiar. Anti-intellectualism was not manifested in
this country for the first time during the 1950*5. Our anti-intellectualism
is, in fact, older than our national identity, and has a long historical
background, An examination of this background suggests that regard
for intellectuals.^ Jit^^ not moved steadily downward

and has not gone into a sudden, recent decline, but is subject to cyclical
fluctuations; it suggests, too, that the resentment from which the in
tellectual has suffered in our time is a manifestation not of a decline
in his position but of his increasing prominence. We know rather little
about all this in any systematic way, and there has not been very much
historically informed thinking on the subject, A great deal has been
written about the long-running quarrel between American intellectuals
and their country, but such writings deal mainly with America as seen
by the intellectuals, and give only occasional glimpses of intellect and
intellectuals as seen by America,*

One reason anti-intellectualism has not even been clearly defined

2 The only American historian, to my knowledge, who has concerned himself
extensively with the problem is Merle Gurti, in his suggestive volume, Ameri
can Paradox ( New Brunswick, New Jersey, 1956 ) and in his presidential address
before the. American Historical Association, "Intellectuals and Other People/
American Historical Review, Vol. LX (January 1955), pp. *so-8a. Jacques
Barssun, in The House of Intellect (New York, 1959 )> has dealt with the subject
largely in contemporary terms and largely with internal strains within the intel-

ual and cultural world, An entire number of tho Journal of Social Issues, Vol.
No. 3 (1955), was devoted to discussions of anti-intellectualism by various

7 Anti-intellectualism in Our Time

is that its very vagueness makes it more serviceable in controversy as
an epithet. But, in any case, it does not yield very readily to definition.
As an idea, it is not a single proposition but a complex of related
propositions. As an attitude, it is not usually foundJqLJLguj^J^SP but
in ambivalence a pure and unalloyed dislike of intellect or intel
lectuals is uncommon. And as a Jalatacical . subject, if it can be called
that, it is not a constant thread but a ior^ej^tuatin^menth from

time to time and drawing its motive power from varying sources. In
these pages I have not held myself to a rigorous or narrow definition,
which would here be rather misplaced. I can see little advantage in a
logically defensible but historically arbitrary act of definition, which
would demand singling out one trait among a complex of traits. It is
the complex itself I am interested in the complex of historical rela
tions among a variety of attitudes and ideas that have many points of
convergence. The common strajjx j-hat JbinAg tng^i-TiRr fh^ attjjujjRs and

ideas Which I Call a-nH-i-nf^n^rfnal fa ft r^gp""trne^^ l^jiA <;:iTgpiVinr> nf tVift

life flf the m|nd and of those who are considered to representjt^ and a
disposition^congtantly to minimize the valxie^DdLihatJife,. This admit
tedly general formulation is as close as I find it useful to venture
toward definition. 8

Once this procedure is adopted, it will be clear that anti-
intellectualism cannot be made the subject of a formal history in quite
the same way as the life of a man or the development of an institution
or a social movement. Dealing as I do with the milieu, the atmosphere,
in which American thinking has taken place, I have had to use those
impressionistic devices with which one attempts to reproduce a milieu
or capture an atmosphere.

Before giving some examples of what I mean by anti-intellectualism,
I may perhaps explain what I do not mean. I am not dealing, except
incidentally, with the internal feuds or contentions of the American
intellectual community. American intellectuals, like intellectuals else
where, are often uneasy in their role; they are given to moments of
self-dou ^t, and even of self -hatred, and at times they make acidulous
and swe ping comments on the whole tribe to which they belong. This
internal Criticism is revealing and interesting, but it is not my main

8 For a ]\ interesting exercise in definition, see Morton White : "Reflections on
Anti- Intel ectualism/ Daedalus (Summer, 1965,), pp. 45768, White makes a use
ful distinction between the anti-intellectual, who is hostile to intellectuals, and
th anti-intellectualist, who is critical of the claims of rational intellect in knowl
edge and in life. He treats at some length the respective strategies of the two, and
their points of convergence.

INTRODUCTION 8

concern. Neither is the ill-mannered or ill-considered criticism that one
intellectual may make of another. No one, for example, ever poured
more scorn on the American professoriat than H. L. Mencken, and no
one has portrayed other writers in fiction with more venom than Mary
McCarthy; but we would not on this account dream of classing
Mencken with William F. Buckley as an enemy of the professors nor
Miss McCarthy with the late senator of the same name. 4 The criticism
of other intellectuals is, after all, one of the most important functions
of the intellectual, and he customarily performs it with vivacity. We
may hope, but we can hardly expect, that he will also do it with
charity, grace, and precision. Because it is the business of intellectuals
to be diverse and contrary-minded, we must accept the risk that at
times they will be merely quarrelsome.

It is important, finally, if we are to avoid hopeless confusion, to be
clear that anti-intellectualism is not here identified with a type of
philosophical doctrine which I prefer to call anti-rationalism. The
ideas of thinkers like Nietzsche, Sorel, or Bergson, Emerson, Whitman,
or William James, or of writers like William Blake, D. H. Lawrence, or
Ernest Hemingway may be called anti-rationalist; but these men were
not characteristically anti-intellectual in the sociological and political
sense in which I use the term. It is of course true that anti-intellcctualist

4 These considerations serve as a forcible reminder that there is in America, as
elsewhere, a kind of intellectual establishment that embraces a wide range of
views. It is generally understood (although there are marginal cases) whether a
particular person is inside or outside this establishment. The establishment has a
double standard for evaluating the criticism of the intellectuals; criticism from
within is commonly accepted as having a basically benign intent and is more likely
to be heard solely on its merits; but criticism from outside even th same criticism
will be resented as hostile and stigmatized as anti-intellectual and potentially
dangerous. For example, some years ago many intellectuals were critical of the
great foundations for devoting too much of their research money to the support of
large-budget "projects," as opposed to individual scholarship. But when the Reece
Committee was hot on the trail of the foundations, the same intellectuals were not
happy to see the same criticism (among others more specious) pressed by such
an agency. It was not that they had ceased to believe in th criticism but that they
neither liked nor trusted the source. ?

Of course, not only intellectuals do this; it is a common phenomenon * of group
life. Members of a political party or a minority group may invoke a simi *iir double
standard against criticism, depending on whether it originates from insi le or out
side the ranks. There is, moreover, som justification for such double standards, in
historical fact if not in logic, becau.se the intent that lies behind criticise * unfortu
nately becomes an ingredient in its applicability. The intellectuals wha criticized
the foundations were doing so in the hope (as they saw it) of constructively modi
fying foundation policies, whereas th line of inquiry pursued by the Eeece Com
mittee Bright have led to crippling or destroying them. Again, veryone under-
stands %at a joke, say, about Jews or Negroes has different overtones when it is
told within the group and when it is told by outsiders.

9 Anti irtfettectualism in Our Time

movements often invoke the ideas of such anti-rationalist thinkers
(Emerson alone has provided them with a great many texts); but
only when they do, and only marginally^ is highbrow anti-rationalism
a part of my story. In these pages I am centrally concerned -with wide
spread social attitudes, with political behavior, and with middle-brow
and low-brow responses, only incidentally with articulate theories.
The attitudes that interest me most are those which would, to the ex
tent that they become effective in our affairs, gravely inhibit or im
poverish intellectual and cultural life. Some examples, taken from our
recent history, may put flesh on the bare bones of definition.

We might begin with some definitions supplied by those most acutely
dissatisfied with American intellectuals.

Exhibit A. During the campaign of 1952, the country seemed to be in
need of some term to express that disdain for intellectuals which had
by then become a self-conscious motif in American politics. The word
egghead was originally used without invidious associations, 5 but quickly
assumed them, and acquired a much sharper overtone than the tradi
tional highbrow. Shortly after the campaign was over, Louis Bromfield,
a popular novelist of right-wing political persuasion, suggested that the
word might some day find its way into dictionaries as follows: 6

Egghead: A person of spurious intellectual pretensions, often a
professor or the protege of a professor. Fundamentally superficial.
Over-emotional and feminine in reactions to any problem. Super
cilious and surfeited with conceit and contempt for the experi
ence of more sound and able men. Essentially confused in thought
and immersed in mixture of sentimentality and violent evange
lism. A doctrinaire supporter of Middle-European socialism as
opposed to Greco-French-American ideas of democracy and liber
alism. Subject to the old-fashioned philosophical morality of
Nietzs foe which frequently leads him into jail or disgrace. A self-

5 The terra was taken up as a consequence of a column by Stewart Alsop, in
which that reporter recorded a conversation with his brother John. The columnist
remarked that many intelligent people who were normally Republicans obviously
admired Stevenson. "Sure, said his brother, "all the egg-heads love Stevenson.
But how riteny egg-heads do you think there are?" Joseph and Stewart Alsop:
The Reporter s Trade (New York, 1958), p. 188,

6 Louis feromfield: "The Triumph of the Egghead/ The Freeman, Vol. Ill
(Decembe i, 1952), p. 158.

INTRODUCTION- 10

conscious prig, so given to examining all sides of a question that
he becomes thoroughly addled while remaining always in the
same spot. An anemic bleeding heart.

"The recent election," Bromfield remarked, "demonstrated a number
of things, not the least of them being the extreme remoteness of the
egghead from the thought and feeling of the whole of the people."

Exhibit B. Almost two years later President Eisenhower appeared to
give official sanction to a similarly disdainful view of intellectuals.
Speaking at a Republican meeting in Los Angeles in 1954, he reported
a view, expressed to him by a trade-union leader, that the people,
presented with the whole truth, will always support the right cause.
The President added: 7

It was a rather comforting thought to have this labor leader
saying this, when we had so many wisecracking so-called intel
lectuals going around and showing how wrong was everybody
who don t happen to agree with them.

By the way, I heard a definition of an intellectual that I
thought was very interesting: a man who takes more words than
are necessary to tell more than he knows.

Exhibit C. One of the issues at stake in the controversies of the 1950*3
was the old one about the place of expertise in political life. Perhaps
the high moment in the case against the expert and for the amateur
occurred in 1957 when a chain-store president, Maxwell H. Cluck, was
nominated to be ambassador to Ceylon. Mr. Gluck had contributed,
by his own estimate, $20,000 or $30,000 to the Republican campaign
of 1956, but, like many such appointees before him, was not known
for having any experience in politics or diplomacy. Questioned by
Senator Fulbright about his qualifications for the post, Mr. Gluck had
some difficulty: 8

FULBRIGHT : What are the problems in Ceylon you think you can

deal with?

GLUCK : One of the problems are the people there, I Relieve I
can I think I can establish, unless we a^fin, rni-

7 White House Press Release, "Remarks of the President at tho Brenkfust
Given by Various Republican Groups of Southern California, Statlar Hotel, Los
Angeles . . . September #4, 1954," p. 4; italics added. It i$ possible tjint the Presi
dent had heard something of the kind from his Secretary of Defensjk Charles E.

"

, who was quoted elsewhere as saying: "An egghead is a man who doesn t
stand everything he knows/" Richard and Gladys Harkness: "The Wit and
Wisdj,of Charlie Wilson," Header * Digest, VoL LXXI (August, 19*7), p. 197.
s rftfeA Times, August i, 1957.

ii Anti-intelleatualism in Our Time

less I run into something that I have not run into
before a good relationship and good feeling toward
the United States. . . .
FULBRIGHT Do you know our Ambassador to India?

GLXJCK

FULBRIGHT
GLTJCK

FULBRIGHT
GLXJCK

I know John Sherman Cooper, the previous Ambas
sador.

Do you know who the Prime Minister of India is?
Yes, but I can t pronounce his name.
Do you know who the Prime Minister of Ceylon is?
His name is unfamiliar now, I cannot call it off.

Doubts about Mr. Cluck s preparation for the post he was to oc
cupy led to the suggestion that he had been named because of
his contribution to the Republican campaign. In a press conference
held July 31, 1957, a reporter raised the question, whereupon Presi
dent Eisenhower remarked that an appointment in return for cam
paign contributions was unthinkable. About his nominee s competence,
he observed: 9

Now, as to the man s ignorance, this is the way he was ap
pointed: he was selected from a group of men that were recom
mended highly by a number of people I respect. His business
career was examined, the F.B.I. reports on him were all good.
Of course, we knew he had never been to Ceylon, he wasn t thor
oughly familiar with it; but certainly he can learn if he is the
kind of character and kind of man we believe him to be.
It is important to add that Mr. Gluck s service in Ceylon was termi
nated after a year by his resignation.

Exhibit D. One of the grievances of American scientists was their
awareness that America s disdain for pure science was a handicap not
only to investigation but also to the progress of research and develop
ment in the Department of Defense. Examining Secretary of Defense
Charles E. Wilson in 1954 before the Senate Committee on Armed
Services, Senator Stuart Symington of Missouri quoted earlier testi
mony in which the Secretary had said, among other things, that if
there was to be pure research it should be subsidized by some agency
other than the Department of Defense. "I am not much interested,"
Secretary Wilson had testified, "as a military project in why potatoes
turn brown when they are fried." Pressing Secretary Wilson, Senator
Symington pointed to testimony that had been given about the lack of

e Ibid.

INTRODUCTION 12

sufficient money for research not on potatoes but on bombers, nuclear
propulsion, electronics, missiles, radar, and other subjects. The Secre
tary replied: *

Important research and development is going on in all those
areas. . . .

On the other side, it is very difficult to get these men who are
trying to think out ahead all the time to come down to brass
tacks and list the projects and what they expect to get. . . .
They would just like to have a pot of money without too much
supervision that they could reach into. . . .

In the first place, if you knoto what you are doing, why it is
not pure research. That complicates it.

Exhibit E. The kind of anti-intellectualism expressed in official circles
during the 1950*3 was mainly the traditional businessman s suspicion
of experts -working in any area outside his control, whether in scientific
laboratories, universities, or diplomatic corps. Far more acute and
sweeping was the hostility to intellectuals expressed on the far-right
wing, a categoxical folkish dislike of the educated classes and of any
thing respectable, established, pedigreed, or cultivated. The right-wing
crusade of the 1950*8 was full of heated rhetoric about "Harvard pro
fessors, twisted-thinking intellectuals ... in the State Department**;
those who are "burdened with Phi Beta Kappa keys and academic
honors" but not "equally loaded with honesty and common sense";
"the American respectables, the socially pedigreed, the culturally ac
ceptable, the certified gentlemen and scholars of the day, dripping
with college degrees . * . the "best people" who were for Alger Hiss";
"the pompous diplomat in striped pants with phony British accent";
those who try to fight Communism "with kid gloves in perfumed draw
ing rooms "; Easterners who "insult the people of the great Midwest
and West, the heart of America"; those who can "trace their ancestry
back to the eighteenth century or even further" but whoso loyalty is
still not above suspicion; those who understand "the Grotorx vocabulary
of the Hiss-Achcson group." 2 The spirit of this rhetorical jacquerie was
caught by an editorial writer for the Freeman: 8

1 U.S. Congress, 84th Congress, and session, Senate Committee on Armed Serv
ices: Hearings, Vol. XVI, pp, 174$, 1744 (July a, 1956 ); italics added,

2 This melange of images is taken from the more extended account of the scape
goats of the 1950*3 in Immanuel Wallerstein s unpublished M.A, essay; "McCarthy-
ism and the Conservative/* Columbia University, 1954, pp. 46 ff.

8 Freeman, VoL XX (November 5, 1951)^ p. 7%

!3 Anti-intellectualism in Our Time

The truly appalling phenomenon is the irrationality of the
college-educated mob that has descended upon Joseph R. Mc
Carthy. . . . Suppose Mr. McCarthy were indeed the cad the
"respectable" press makes him out to be; would this . . . justify
the cataclysmic eruptions that, for almost a year now, have ema
nated from all the better appointed editorial offices of New York
and Washington, D.C.? ... It must be something in McCarthy s
personal makeup. He possesses, it seems, a sort of animal negative-
pole magnetism which repels alumni of Harvard, Princeton and
Yale. And we think we know what it is: This young man is con
stitutionally incapable of deference to social status.

McCarthy himself found the central reasons for America s difficulties
in areas where social status was most secure. The trouble^ he said in
the published version of his famous Wheeling speech, lay in 4

the traitorous actions of those who have been treated so well by
this Nation. It has not been the less fortunate or members of
minority groups who have been selling this Nation out, but rather
those who have had all the benefits that the wealthiest nation on
earth has had to offer the finest homes, the finest college educa
tion, and the finest jobs in Government we can give. This is glar
ingly true in the State Department. There the bright young men
who are born with silver spoons in their mouths are the ones who
have been worst.

Exhibit F. The universities, particularly the better-known universities,
were constantly marked out as targets by right-wing critics; but ac
cording to one writer in the Freeman there appears to have been only
an arbitrary reason for this discrimination against the Ivy League, since
he considered that Communism is spreading in all our colleges: e

Our universities are the training grounds for the barbarians of
the future, those who, in the guise of learning, shall come forth
loaded with pitchforks of ignorance and cynicism, and stab and
destroy the remnants of human civilization. It will not be the
subway peasants who will tear down the walls: they will merely
do the bidding of our learned brethren . . who will erase indi
vidual Freedom from the ledgers of human thought. . . .

* Congressional Record, 8ist Congress, and session, p. 1954 (February ao,
3-950).

5 Tack Schwartzman: "Natural Law and the Campus," Freeman* Vol. II (De
cember 3, 1951 ) PP-

INTRODUCTION 14

If you send your son to tihe colleges of today, you will create
the Executioner of tomorrow. The rebirth of idealism must come
from the scattered monasteries of non-collegiate thought.

Exhibit G. Right-wing hostility to universities was in part a question
of deference and social ^ta&sjb^^jgart^^o a" reflection of the old
Jacksonian dislikerdf spe5alistsand experts. Here is a characteristic
assertion abotiTTKe~~equai competence <5f the common man (in this
case the common woman) and the supposed experts, written by the
amateur economist, Frank Chodorov, author of The Income Tax: The
Root of All Evil, and one of the most engaging of the right-wing
spokesmen: 6

A parcel of eminent economists, called into consultation by the
Rockefeller Brothers Fund to diagnose the national ailment known
as recession, came up with a prescription that, though slightly con
densed, covered the better part of two pages in The New York
Times. The prominence of these doctors makes it presumptuous
for one who has not "majored" in economics to examine the in
gredients of their curative concoction. Yet the fact is that all of
us are economists by necessity, since all of us are engaged in
making a living, which is what economics is all about. Any literate
housewife, endowed with a modicum of common sense, should be
able to evaluate the specifics in the prescription, provided these
are extracted from the verbiage in which they are clothed.

Exhibit H. Although the following may well be considered by dis
criminating readers as anti-cultural rather than anti-intellectual, I can
not omit some remarks by Congressman George Dondero of Michigan,
long a vigilant crusader against Communism in the schools and against
cubism, expressionism, surrealism, dadaism, futurism, and other move
ments in art: 7

The art of the isms, the weapon of the Russian Revolution, is
the art which has been transplanted to America, and today, hav
ing infiltrated and saturated many of our art centers, threatens
to overawe, override and overpower the fine art of our tradition
and inheritance. So-called modern or contemporary art in our

6 "Shake Well before Using," National Review, VoL V (June 7, 1958), p. 544*
T Congressional Record, 8ist Congress, ist session, p. 11584 (August 16, 1949);
also Dondero s address on "Communism in Our Schools/* Congressional Rec-
Congress, and session, pp. A, 3516-18 (June 14, 1946), and his speech,
ist Conspiracy in Art Threatens American Museums/ Congressional
&KLd Congress, and session, pp, #433-7 ( March 17, 1952 ) .

1 5 Anti-intellectualism in Our Time

own beloved country contains all the isms of depravity, deca
dence, and destruction. .

All these isms are of foreign origin, and truly should have no
place in American art. ... All are instruments and weapons of
destruction.

Exhibit I. Since I shall have much to say in these pages about anti-
intellectualism in the evangelical tradition, it seems important to cite
at least one survival of this tradition. These brief quotations are taken
from the most successful evangelist of our time, Billy Graham, voted
by the American public in a Gallup Poll of 1958 only after Eisenhower,
Churchill, and Albert Schweitzer as "the most admired man in the
world": 8

Moral standards of yesterday to many individuals are no stand
ard for today unless supported by the so-called "intellectuals/*

I sincerely believe that partial education throughout the world
is far worse than none at all, if we only educate the mind without
the soul. . . . Turn that man loose upon the world [who has] no
power higher than his own, he is a monstrosity, he is but halfway
educated, and is more dangerous than though he were not edu
cated at all.

You can stick a public school and a university in the middle of
every block of every city in America and you will never keep
America from rotting morally by mere intellectual education.

During the past few years the intellectual props have been
knocked out from under the theories of men. Even the average
university professor is willing to listen to the voice of the preacher.

[In place of the Bible] we substituted reason, rationalism, mind
culture, science worship, the working power of government,
Freudianism, naturalism, humanism, behaviorism, positivism, ma
terialism, and idealism. [This is the work of] so-called intellec
tuals. Thousands of these "intellectuals" have publicly stated that
morality is relative that there is no norm or absolute stand
ard. . . .

Exhibit J. In the post-Sputnik furor over American education, one of
the most criticized school systems was that of California, which had
been notable for its experimentation with curricula. When the San
Francisco School District commissioned a number of professional

8 William G. McLcmghlin, Jr.; Billy Graham: Revivalist in a Secular Age (New
York, 1960), pp. 89, 212, 213; on the Gallup Poll, seep. 5.

INTRODUCTION 16

scholars to examine their schools, the committee constituted for this
purpose urged a return to firmer academic standards. Six educational
organizations produced a sharp counterattack in which they criticized
the authors of the San Francisco report for "academic pettiness and
snobbery" and for going beyond their competence in limiting the pur
poses of education to "informing the mind and developing the in
telligence/ and reasserted the value of "other goals of education, such
as preparation for citizenship, occupational competence, successful
family life, self-realization in ethical, moral, aesthetic and spiritual
dimensions, and the enjoyment of physical health." The educationists
argued that an especially praiseworthy feature of American education
had been 9

the attempt to avoid a highly rigid system of education. To do so
does not mean that academic competence is not regarded as
highly important to any society, but it does recognize that his
torically, education systems which stress absorption of accumu
lated knowledge for its own sake have tended to produce
decadence. Those who would "fix" the curriculum and freeze edu
cational purpose misunderstand the unique function of education
in American democracy.

Exhibit K. The following is an excerpt from a parent s report, originally
written in answer to a teacher s complaint about the lax standards in
contemporary education. The entire piece is worth reading as a vivid
statement by a parent who identifies wholly with the non-academic
child and the newer education. As we shall see, the stereotype of the
schoolteacher expressed here has deep historical roots. 1

But kindergarten teachers understand children. Theirs is a
child-centered program. School days were one continuous joy of
games and music and colors and friendliness. Life rolled mer
rily along through the first grade, the second grade, the third
grade . . . then came arithmetic! Failure like a spectre arose to
haunt our days and harass our nights. Father and mother began
to attend lectures on psychology and to read about inferiority
complexes. We dragged through the fourth grade and into the

9 Judging and Improving the Schools: Current Issues ( Burlingame, California,
1960), pp. 4, 5, 7, 8; italics added. The document under fire was William C,
Bark et al.: Report of the San Francisco Curriculum Survey Committee (San
Francisco, 1960).

1 Robert E, Brownlee: "A Parent Speaks Out," Progressive Education, Vol.
XVII (October, 1940), pp. 42,041.

17 Anti-intellectualisrn, in Our Time

fifth. Something had to be done. Even father couldn t solve all the
problems. I decided to have a talk with the teacher.

There was no welcome on the mat of that school. No one
greeted the stranger or made note of his coming. A somber hall
way presented itself, punctuated at regular intervals by closed
doors. Unfamiliar sounds came from within. I inquired my way
of a hurrying youngster and then knocked at the forbidding
threshold. To the teacher I announced my name, smiling as
pleasantly as I could. "Oh, yes," she said, as if my business were
already known to her and reached for her classbook, quick on
the draw like a movie gangster clutching for his gun.

The names of the pupils appeared on a ruled page in neat and
alphabetical precision. The teacher moved a bloodless finger down
the margin of the page to my daughter s name. After each name
were little squares. In the squares were little marks, symbols that
I did not understand. Her finger moved across the page. My child s
marks were not the same as those of the other children. She
looked up triumphantly as if there were nothing more to be said.

1 was thinking of the small compass into which she had com
pressed the total activities of a very lively youngster. I was in
terested in a whole life, a whole personality; the teacher, merely
in arithmetical ability. I wished I had not come. I left uninformed
and uncomf orted.

Exhibit L. The following remarks have already been made famous by
Arthur Bestor, but they will bear repetition. After delivering and pub
lishing the address excerpted here, the author, a junior high-school
principal in Illinois, did not lose caste in his trade but was engaged
for a similar position in Great Neck, Long Island, a post which surely
ranks high in desirability among the nation s secondary schools, and
was subsequently invited to be a visiting member of the faculty of the
school of education of a Midwestern university. 2

Through the years we ve built a sort of halo around reading,
writing, and arithmetic. WeVe said they were for everybody . . .
rich and poor, brilliant and not-so-mentally-endowed, ones who

2 A. H. Lauchner: "How Can the Junior High School Curriculum Be Improved?"
Bulletin of the National Association of Secondary-School Principals, Vol. XXXV
(March, 1951), pp. 299-301. The three dots of elision here do not indicate omis
sions but are the author s punctuation. The address was delivered at a meeting of
this association. See Arthur Bestor s comments in The Restoration of Learning
( New York, 1955 ) > P- 54-

INTRODUCTION 18

liked them and those who failed to go for them. Teacher has said
that these were something "everyone should learn." The principal
has remarked, "All educated people know how to -write, spell,
and read." When some child declared a dislike for a sacred sub
ject, he was warned that, if he failed to master it, he would
grow up to be a so-and-so.

The Three R s for All Children, and All Children for the Three
R*s! That was it.

We ve made some progress in getting rid of that slogan. But
every now and then some mother with a Phi Beta Kappa award
or some employer who has hired a girl who can t spell stirs up a
fuss about the schools . . . and ground is lost. . . .

When -we come to the realization that not every child has to
read, figure, write and spell . . . that many of them either can
not or will not master these chores . . . then we shall be on the
road to improving the junior high curriculum.

Between this day and that a lot of selling must take place.
But it s coming. We shall some day accept the thought that it is
just as illogical to assume that every boy must be able to read as
it is that each one must be able to perform on a violin, that it is
no more reasonable to require that each girl shall spell well than
it is that each one shall bake a good cherry pie.

We cannot all do the same things. We do not like to do the
same things. And we won t. When adults finally realize that fact,
everyone will be happier . . , and schools will be nicer places in
which to live. . . .

If and when we are able to convince a few folks that mastery
of reading, writing, and arithmetic is not the one road leading to
happy, successful living, the next step is to cut down the amount
of time and attention devoted to these areas in general junior
high-school courses. * . *

One junior high in the East has, after long and careful study,
accepted the fact that some twenty percent of their students will
not be up to standard in reading , * . and they are doing other
things for these boys and girls. That s straight thinking, Contrast
that with the junior high which says, "Every student must know
the multiplication tables before graduation.*

These exhibits, though their sources and intentions are various, col
lectivity display the ideal assumptions of anti-intellectualism- Intel-

*9 Anti-intellectualism in Our Time

lectuals, it may be held, are pretentious, conceited, effeminate, and
snobbish; and very likely immoral, dangerous, and subversive. The
plain sense of the common man, especially i tested by success in some
demanding line of practical work, is an altogether adequate substitute
for, if not actually much superior to, formal knowledge and expertise
acquired in the schools. Not surprisingly, institutions in which intel
lectuals tend to be influential, like universities and colleges, are rotten
to the core. In any case, the discipline of the heart, and the old-
fashioned principles of religion and morality, are more reliable guides
to life than an education which aims to produce minds responsive to
new trends in thought and art. Even at the level of elementary educa
tion, a schooling that puts too much stress on the acquisition of mere
knowledge, as opposed to the vigorous development of physical and
emotional life, is heartless in its mode of conduct and threatens to
produce social decadence.

* 4

To avoid some hazards to understanding, it is perhaps necessary to say
that a work given single-mindedly to the exploration of such a theme*
as this must inevitably have the effect of highlighting its importance in
a way that would not be warranted in a comprehensive history of
American culture. I can only say that I do not suffer from the delusion
that the complexities of American history can be satisfactorily reduced
to a running battle between the eggheads and the fatheads. Moreover,
to the extent that our history can be considered one of cultural and
intellectual conflicts, the public is not simply divided into intellectual
and anti-intellectual factions. The greater part of the public, and a
great part even of the intelligent and alert public, is simply non-
intellectual; it is infused with enough ambivalence about intellect and
intellectuals to be swayed now this way and now that on current cul
tural issues. It has an ingrained distrust of eggheads, but also a gen
uine yearning for enlightenment and culture. Moreover, a book on
anti-intellectualism in America can hardly be taken as though it were
meant to be a balanced assessment of our culture, any more than a
history of bankruptcies could be taken as a full history of our business
life. Although I am convinced that anti-intellectualism is pervasive in
our culture, I believe that it can rarely be called dominant. Again and
again I have noticed, as I hope readers will, that the more mild and
benign forms of anti-intellectualism prove to be the most widespread,

21 Anti-intellectualism in Our Time

and sins of the flesh, the Churqh itself remains holy. Even here, how
ever, I do not forget that intellect itself can be overvalued, and that
reasonable attempts to set it in its proper place in human affairs
should not be called anti-intellectual. One does not care to dissent
when T. S. Eliot observes that "intellectual ability without the more
human attributes is admirable only in the same way as the brilliance
of a child chess prodigy/ 4 But in a world full of dangers, the danger
that American society as a whole will overesteem intellect or assign
it such a transcendent value as to displace other legitimate values is
one that need hardly trouble us.

Possibly the greatest hazard of this venture is that of encouraging
the notion that anti-intellectualism is commonly found in a pure or
unmixed state. It seems clear that those who have some quarrel with
intellect are almost always ambivalent about it: they mix respect and
awe with suspicion and resentment; and this has been true in many
societies and phases of human history. In any case, anti-intellectualism
is not the creation of people who are categorically hostile to ideas.
Quite the contrary: just as the most effective enemy of the educated
man may be the half -educated man, so the leading anti-intellectuals
are usually men deeply engaged with ideas, often obsessively engaged
with this or that outworn or rejected idea. Few intellectuals are without
moments of anti-intellectualism; few anti-intellectuals without single-
minded intellectual passions. In so far as anti-intellectualism becomes
articulate enough to be traced historically or widespread enough to
make itself felt in contemporary controversy, it has to have spokesmen
who are at least to some degree competent. These spokesmen are in
the main neither the uneducated nor the unintellectual, but rather the
marginal intellectuals, would-be intellectuals, unfrocked or embittered
intellectuals, the literate leaders of the semi-literate, full of seriousness
and high purpose about the causes that bring them to the attention of
the world. I have found anti-intellectual leaders who were evangelical
ministers, many of them highly intelligent and some even learned;
fundamentalists, articulate about their theology; politicians, including
some of the shrewdest; businessmen or other spokesmen of the practi
cal demands of American culture; right-wing editors of strong in
tellectual pretensions and convictions; various marginal writers (vide
the anti-intellectualism of the Beatniks ) ; anti-Communist pundits, of
fended by the past heresies of a large segment of the intellectual com
munity; and, for that matter, Communist leaders, who had much use

* Notes towards the Definition of Culture (London, 1948), p. 23.

INTRODUCTION 20

whereas the most malign forms are found mainly among small if
vociferous minority groups. Again, this is not, as it perhaps should be, a
comparative study: my concentration on anti-intellectualism in the
United States is no more than the result of a special, and possibly
parochial, interest in American society. I do not assume that anti-
intellectualism does not exist elsewhere. I think that it is a problem of
more than ordinary acuteness here, but I believe it has been present
in some form and degree in most societies; in one it takes the form
of the administering of hemlock, in another of town-and-gown riots, in
another of censorship and regimentation, in still another of Congres
sional investigations. I am disposed to believe that anti-intellectualism,
though it has its own universality, may be considered a part of our
English cultural inheritance, and that it is notably strong in Anglo-
American experience. A few years ago Leonard Woolf remarked that
"no people has ever despised and distrusted the intellect and intellec
tuals more than the British/ 3 Perhaps Mr. Woolf had not given
sufficient thought to the claims of the Americans to supremacy in this
respect (which is understandable, since the British have been tired
for more than a century of American boasting); but that a British
intellectual so long seasoned and so well informed on the cultural life
of his own country could have made such a remark may well give us
pause. Although the situation of American intellectuals poses problems
of special urgency and poignancy, many of their woes are the common
experiences of intellectuals elsewhere, and there are some compensat
ing circumstances in American life.

This book is a critical inquiry, not a legal brief for the intellectuals
against the American community. I have no desire to encourage the
self-pity to which intellectuals are sometimes prone by suggesting
that they have been vessels of pure virtue set down in Babylon. One
does not need to assert this, or to assert that intellectuals should get
sweeping indulgence or exercise great power, in order to insist that
respect for intellect and its functions is important to the culture and
the health of any society, and that in ours this respect has often been
notably lacking. No one who lives among intellectuals is likely to
idealize them unduly; but their relation as fallible persons to the vital
function of intellect should remind us of the wisdom of the Church,
which holds that although the priesthood is vulnerable to the errors

5 "G, E, Moore," Encounter, Vol. XII (January, 1959), p. 68; the context, it
should be said, suggests that Woolf was quite aware of the necessary qualifications
to tibia temark*

INTRODUCTION M,

for intellectuals when they could use them, but the utmost contempt
for what intellectuals are concerned with. The hostility so prominent
in the temper of these men is not directed against ideas as such, not
even in every case against intellectuals as such. The spokesmen of
anti-intellectualism are almost always devoted to some ideas, and
much as they may hate the regnant intellectuals among their living
contemporaries, they may be devotees of some intellectuals long dead
Adam Smith perhaps, or Thomas Aquinas, or John Calvin, or even
Karl Marx.

It would also be mistaken, as well as uncharitable, to imagine that
the men and women who from time to time carry the banners of anti-
intellectualism are of necessity committed to it as though it were a
positive creed or a kind of principle. In fact, anti-intellectualism is
usually the incidental consequence of some other intention, often some
justifiable intention. Hardly anyone believes himself to be against
thought and culture. Men do not rise in the morning, grin at them
selves in their mirrors, and say: "Ah, today I shall torment an in
tellectual and strangle an idea!" Only rarely, and with the gravest of
misgivings, then, can we designate an individual as being constitu
tionally anti-intellectual. In any case, it would be of little value in
this enterprise and certainly it is no concern of mine to classify or
stigmatize individuals; what is important is to estimate the historical
tendency of certain attitudes, movements, and ideas. 5 With respect to
these, some individuals will appear now on one side and now on an
other. In fact, anti-intellectualism is often characteristic of forces dia
metrically opposed to each other. Businessmen and labor leaders may
have views of the intellectual class which are surprisingly similar.
Again, progressive education has had its own. strong anti-intellectual
element, and yet its harshest and most determined foes, who are right-
wing vigilantes, manifest their own anti-intellectualism, which is,
though different in style, less equivocal and more militant.

To be confronted with a simple and unqualified evil is no doubt a
kind of luxury; but such is not the case here; and if anti-intellectualism
has become, as I believe it has 3 ^ Jbgogjfl^^ quality jr^ our

civilization, it has become so because it has often been linked to good,
or at least defensible, causes. It first got its strong grip on our ways
of thinking because it was fostered by axx evangelical religion that

5 As a case in point, I have found it desirable to discuss the anti-intellectual
iaoplications and the anti-intellectual consequences of some educational theories of
Toinn Dewey; but it would be absurd and impertinent to say, on *V*g account, that
M^Rrey was an anti-intellectual.

23 Antt-inteUectualism in Our Time

also purveyed many humane and democratic sentiments. It made its
way into our politics because it became ^ assocaated^sg&jQur, passion
for equality- It has become formidableia our education partly because
our educational beliefs are evangelically egalitarian. Hence, as far as
possible, our ajitLloteUectaalism must be excised from the^ benevolent
indulges upon which it livesjbyjconstant and delicate acts of intellec
tual surgery which spare these impulses themselves- Only in this way
can anti-intellectualism be checked and contained; I do not say elimi
nated altogether, for I believe not only that this is beyond our powers
but also that an unbridled passion for the total elimination of this or
that evil can be as dangerous as any of the delusions of our time.

[ 24 I

CHAPTER II

On the Unpopularity
of Intellect

B,

BEFORE attempting to estimate the qualities in our society that
make intellect unpopular, it seems necessary to say something about
what intellect is usually understood to be. When one hopes to under
stand a common prejudice., common usage provides a good place to
begin. Anyone who scans popular American writing with this interest
in mind will be struck by the manifest difference between the idea of
intellect and the idea of intelligence. The first is frequently used as a
kind of epithet, the second never. No one questions the value of in
telligence; as an abstract quality it is universally esteemed, and indi
viduals who seem to have it in exceptional degree are highly re
garded. The man of intelligence is always praised; the man of in
tellect is sometimes also praised, especially when it is believed that
intellect involves intelligence, but he is also often looked upon with
resentment or suspicion. It is he, and not the intelligent man, who may
be called unreliable, superfluous, immoral, or subversive; sometimes he
is even said to be, for all his intellect, unintelligent. 1

Although the difference between the qualities of intelligence and
intellect is more often assumed than defined, the context of popular

1 1 do not want to suggest that this distinction is made only in the United States,
since it seems to be common wherever there is a class that finds intellectuals a
nuisance and yet does not want to throw overboard its own claims to intelligence.
Thus, in France, after the intellectuals had emerged as a kind of social force, one
finds Maurice Barres writing in zgoa: "I d rather be intelligent than an intel
lectual." Victor Brombert: The Intellectual Hero: Studies in the French Novel,
1880-1955 (Philadelphia, 1961), p. 25.

s&5 On the Unpopularity of Intellect

usage makes it possible to extract the nub of the distinction, which
seems to be almost universally understood: intelligence J^an excel
lence^ of mind that is employed within a fairly narrow, immediate,
and predictable range; it is a manipulative, adfustive, unfailingly prac
tical quality one of the most eminent and endearing of the animal
virtues. Intelligence works within the framework of limited but
clearly stated goals, and may be quick to shear away questions of
thought that do not seem to help in reaching them. Finally, it is of
such universal use that it can daily be seen at work and admired alike
by simple or complex minds.

Intellect^ on the other hand, is the critical, creative, and contem
plative^ side of mind. Whereas intelligence seeks to grasp, manipulate,
re-order, adjust, intellect examines, ponders, wonders, theorizes, criti
cizes, imagines. Intelligence will seize the immediate meaning in a
situation and evaluate it. Intellect evaluates evaluations, and looks
for the meanings of situations as a whole. Intelligence can be praised
as a quality in animals; intellect, being a unique manifestation of
human dignity, is both praised and assailed as a quality in men.
When the difference is so defined, it becomes easier to understand
why we sometimes say that a mind of admittedly penetrating intelli
gence is relatively unintellectual; and why, by the same token, we
see among minds that are unmistakably intellectual a considerable
range of intelligence.

This distinction may seem excessively abstract, but it is frequently
illustrated in American culture. In our education, for example, it has
never been doubted that the selection and development of intelligence
is a goal of central importance; but the extent to which education
should foster intellect has been a matter of the most heated contro
versy, and the opponents of intellect in most spheres of public educa
tion have exercised preponderant power. But perhaps the most im
pressive illustration arises from a comparison of the American regard
for inventive skill as opposed to skill in pure science. Our greatest in
ventive genius, Thomas A. Edison, was all but canonized by the
American public, and a legend has been built around him. One can
not, I suppose, expect that achievements in pure science would receive
the same public applause that came to inventions as spectacular and
as directly influential on ordinary life as Edison s. But one might have
expected that our greatest genius in pure science, Josiah Willard
Gibbs, who laid the theoretical foundations for modern physical chem
istry, would have been a figure of some comparable acclaim among

INTRODUCTION 2-6

the educated public. Yet Gibbs, whose work was celebrated in Eu
rope, lived out his life in public and even professional obscurity at Yale,
where he taught for thirty-two years. Yale, which led American uni
versities in its scientific achievements during the nineteenth century,
was unable in those thirty-two years to provide him with more than a
half dozen or so graduate students who could understand his work,
and never took the trouble to award him an honorary degree. 2

A special difficulty arises when we speak of the fate of intellect in
society; this difficulty stems from the fact that we are compelled to
speak of intellect in vocational terms, though we may recognize that
intellect is not simply a matter of vocation. Intellect is considered in
general usage to be an attribute of certain professions and vocations;
we speak of the intellectual as being a writer or a critic, a professor
or a scientist, an editor, journalist, lawyer, clergyman, or the like. As
Jacques Barzun has said, the intellectual is a man who carries a brief
case. It is hardly possible to dispense with this convenience; the status
and the role of intellectuals are bound up with the aggregate of the
brief-case-carrying professions. But few of us believe that a member of
a profession, even a learned profession, is necessarily an intellectual in
any discriminating or demanding sense of the word. In most profes
sions intellect may help, but intelligence will serve well enough with
out it. We know, for instance, that all academic men are not intellec
tuals; we often lament this fact. We know that there is something
about intellect, as opposed to professionally trained intelligence, which
does not adhere to whole vocations but only to persons. And when we
are troubled about the position of intellect and the intellectual class
in our society, it is not only the status of certain vocational groups
which we have in mind, but the value attached to a certain mental
quality.

A great deal of what might be called the journeyman s work of our
culture the work of lawyers, editors, engineers, doctors, indeed of
some writers and of most professors though vitally dependent upon
ideas, is not distinctively intellectual. A man in any of the learned or
quasi-learned professions must have command of a substantial store of
frozen ideas to do his work; he must, if he does it well, use them in
telligently; but in his professional capacity he uses them mainly as

2 The situation of Gibbs is often mentioned as a consequence of American at
titudes. For the general situation it symbolized, see Richard H. Shryock: "Ameri
can Indifference to Basic Science during the Nineteenth Century," Archives Inter-
toire des Sciences, No. 5 ( 1948), pp. 50-65-

#7 On the Unpopularity of Intellect

instruments. The heart o the matter to borrow a distinction made
by Max Weber about politics is that the professional man lives off
ideas, not for them. His professional role, his professional skills, do not
make him an intellectual. He is a mental worker, a technician. He
may happen to be an intellectual as well, but if he is, it is because he
brings to his profession a distinctive feeling about ideas which is not
required by his job. As a professional, he has acquired a stock of mental
skills that are for sale. The skills are highly developed, but we do not
think of him as being an intellectual if certain qualities are missing
from his work disinterested intelligence, generalizing power, free
speculation, fresh observation, creative novelty, radical criticism. At
home he may happen to be an intellectual, but at his job he is a
hired mental technician who uses his mind for the pursuit of ex
ternally determined ends. It is this element the fact that ends are set
from some interest or vantage point outside the intellectual process it
self which characterizes both the zealot, who lives obsessively for a
single idea, and the mental technician, whose mind is used not for
free speculation but for a salable end. The goal here is external and
not self-determined, whereas the intellectual life has a certain spon
taneous character and inner determination. It has also a peculiar poise
of its own, which I believe is established by a balance between two
basic qualities in the intellectual s attitude toward ideas qualities
that may be designated as playfulness and piety.

To define -what is distinctively intellectual it is necessary to be able
to determine what differentiates, say, a professor or a lawyer who is
an intellectual from one who is not; or perhaps more properly, what
enables us to say that at one moment a professor or a lawyer is
acting in a purely routine professional fashion and at another moment
as an intellectual. The difference is not in the character of the ideas
with which he works but in his attitude toward them. I have suggested
that in some sense he lives for ideas which means that he has a sense
of dedication to the life of the mind which is very much like a religious
commitment. This is not surprising, for in a very important way the
role of the intellectual is inherited from the office of the cleric: it im
plies a special sense of the ultimate value in existence of the act of
comprehension. Socrates, when he said that the unexamined life is not
worth living, struck the essence of it. We can hear the voices of various
intellectuals in history repeating their awareness of this feeling, in
accents suitable to time, place, and culture. "The proper function of
the human race, taken in the aggregate," wrote Dante in De Mon-

INTRODUCTION 28

archia, "is to actualize continually the entire capacity possible to the
intellect, primarily in speculation, then through, its extension and for
its sake, secondarily in action." The noblest thing, and the closest pos
sible to divinity, is thus the act of knowing. It is only a somewhat
more secular and activist version of the same commitment which we
hear in the first sentence of Locke s Essay Concerning Human Under
standing: "It is the understanding that sets man above the rest of
sensible beings, and gives him all the advantage and dominion which
he has over them/ Hawthorne, in a passage near the end of The
Blithedale Romance, observes that Nature s highest purpose for man is
"that of conscious intellectual life and sensibility." Finally, in our own
time Andre Malraux puts the question in one of his novels: "How can
one make the best of one s life?" and answers: "By converting as wide
a range of experience as possible into conscious thought."

Intellectualism, though by no means confined to doubters, is often
the sole piety of the skeptic. Some years ago a colleague asked me to
read a brief essay he had written for students going on to do advanced
work in his field. Its ostensible purpose was to show how the life of
the mind could be cultivated within the framework of his own dis
cipline, but its effect was to give an intensely personal expression to
his dedication to intellectual work. Although it was written by a cor
rosively skeptical mind, I felt that I was reading a piece of devotional
literature in some ways comparable to Richard Steele s The Trades
man s Calling or Cotton Mather s Essays to Do Good, for in it the in
tellectual task had been conceived as a calling, much in the fashion
of the old Protestant writers. His work was undertaken as a kind of
devotional exercise, a personal discipline, and to think of it in this
fashion was possible because it was more than merely workmanlike
and professional: it was work at thinking, work done supposedly in
the service of truth. The intellectual life has here taken on a kind of
primary moral significance. It is this aspect of the intellectual s feeling
about ideas that I call his piety. The intellectual is engagS he is
pledged, committed, enlisted. What everyone else is willing to admit,
namely that ideas and abstractions are of signal importance in human
life, he imperatively feels.

Of course what is involved is more than a purely personal discipline
and more than the life of contemplation and understanding itself. For
the life of thought, even though it may be regarded as the highest
form of human activity, is also a medium through which other values
are refined, reasserted, and realized in the human community. Col-

^ 9 On the Unpopularity of Intellect

lectively, intellectuals have often tried to serve as the moral antennae
of the race, anticipating and if possible clarifying fundamental moral
issues before these have forced themselves upon the public conscious
ness. The thinker feels that he ought to be the special custodian of
values like reason and justice which are related to his own search for
truth, and at times he strikes out passionately as a public figure be
cause his very identity seems to be threatened by some gross abuse.
One thinks here of Voltaire defending the Galas family, of Zola speak
ing out for Dreyfus, of the American intellectuals outraged at the trial
of Sacco and Vanzetti.

It would be unfortunate if intellectuals were alone in their concern
for these values, and it is true that their enthusiasm has at times mis
carried. But it is also true that intellectuals are properly more re
sponsive to such values than others; and it is the historic glory of the
intellectual class of the West in modern times that, of all the classes
which could be called in any sense privileged, it has shown the largest
and most consistent concern for the well-being of the classes which
lie below it in the social scale. Behind the intellectual s feeling of com
mitment is the belief that in some measure the world should be made
responsive to his capacity for rationality, his passion for justice and
order: out of this conviction arises much of his value to mankind and,
equally, much of his ability to do mischief.

The very suggestion that the intellectual has a distinctive capacity for
mischief, however, leads to the consideration that his piety, by itself,
is not enough. He may live for ideas, as I have said, but something
must prevent him from living for one idea, from becoming obsessive
or grotesque. Although there have been zealots whom we may still
regard as intellectuals, zealotry is a defect of the breed and not of the
essence. When one s concern for ideas, no matter how dedicated and
sincere, reduces them to the service of some central limited precon
ception or some wholly external end, intellect gets swallowed by
fanaticism. If there is anything more dangerous to the life of the mind
than having no independent commitment to ideas, it is having an
excess of commitment to some special and constricting idea. The effect
is as pbserv^HejB^ can

be overwhelmed by an excess of p^ty ^vp^ndad-.^dtMn too contracted

~~~^~

INTRODUCTION 30

Piety, then, needs a counterpoise, something to prevent it from being
exercised in an excessively rigid way; and this it has, in most intel
lectual temperaments, in the quality I would call playfulness. We
speak of the play of the mind; and certainly the intellectual relishes
the play of the mind for its own sake, and finds in it one of the major
values in life. What one thinks of here is the element of sheer delight
in intellectual activity. Seen in this guise, intellect may be taken as the
healthy animal spirits of the mind, which come into exercise when the
surplus of mental energies is released from the tasks required for
utility and mere survival. "Man is perfectly human," said Schiller,
"only when he plays/* And it is this awareness of an available surplus
beyond the requirements of mere existence that his maxim conveys to
us. Veblen spoke often of the intellectual faculty as "idle curiosity"
but this is a misnomer in so far as the curiosity of the playful mind is
inordinately restless and active. This very restlessness and activity
gives a distinctive cast to its view of truth and its discontent with
dogmas.

Ideally, the pursuit of truth is said to be at the heart of the in
tellectual s business, but this credits his business too much and not quite
enough. As with the pursuit of happiness, the pursuit of truth is itself
gratifying whereas the consummation often turns out to be elusive.
Truth captured loses its glamor; truths long known and widely be
lieved have a way of turning false with time; easy truths are a bore,
and too many of them become half-truths. Whatever the intellectual is
too certain of, if he is healthily playful, he begins to find unsatisfac
tory. The meaning of his intellectual life lies not in the possession of
truth but in the quest for new uncertainties. Harold Rosenberg
summed up this side of the life of the mind supremely well when he
said that the intellectual is one who turns answers into questions.

This element of playfulness infuses products of mind as diverse as
Abelard s Sic et Non and a dadaist poem. But in using the terms play
and playfulness, I do not intend to suggest any lack of seriousness;
quite the contrary. Anyone who has watched children, or adults, at
play will recognize that there is no contradiction between play and
seriousness, and that some forms of play induce a measure of grave
concentration not so readily called forth by work. And playfulness
does not imply the absence of practicality. In American public discus
sion one of the tests to which intellect is constantly submitted when
it is, so to speak, on trial is this criterion of practicality. But in prin
ciple intellect is neither practical nor impractical; it is extra-practical.

3* On the Unpopularity of Intellect

To the zealot overcome by his piety and to the journeyman of ideas
concerned only with his marketable mental skills, the beginning and
end of ideas lies in their efficacy with respect to some goal external to
intellectual processes. The intellectual is not in the first instance con
cerned with such goals. This is not to say that he scorns the practical:
the intrinsic intellectual interest of many practical problems is utterly
absorbing. Still less is it to say that he is impractical; he is simply
concerned with something else, a quality in problems that is not de
fined by asking whether or not they have practical purpose. The notion
that the intellectual is inherently impractical will hardly bear analysis
( one can think so readily of intellectuals who, like Adam Smith, Thomas
Jefferson, Robert Owen, Walter Rathenau, or John Maynard Keynes,
have been eminently practical in the politician s or businessman s sense
of the term). However, practicality is not the essence of his interest
in ideas. Acton put this view in rather an extreme form when he said:
"I think our studies ought to be all but purposeless. They want to be
pursued with chastity, like mathematics."

An example of the intellectual s view of the purely practical is the
response of James Clerk Maxwell, the mathematician and theoretical
physicist, to the invention of the telephone. Asked to give a lecture on
the workings of this new instrument, Maxwell began by saying how
difficult it had been to believe, when word first came about it from
America, that such a thing had actually been devised. But then, he
went on, "when at last this little instrument appeared, consisting, as it
does, of parts, every one of which is familiar to us, and capable of
being put together by an amateur, the disappointment arising from
its humble appearance was only partially relieved on finding that it
was really able to talk." Perhaps, then, this regrettable appearance of
simplicity might be redeemed by the presence somewhere of "some
recondite physical principle, the study of which might worthily occupy
an hour s time of an academic audience." But no; Maxwell had not
met a single person who was unable to understand the physical proc
esses involved, and even the science reporters for the daily press had
almost got it right! 3 The thing was a disappointing bore; it was not
recondite, not difficult, not profound, not complex; it was not intel
lectually new.

Maxwell s reaction does not seem to me to be entirely admirable.
In looking at the telephone from the point of view of a pure scientist,

3 W. D. Niven, ed.: The Scientific Papers of James Clerk Maxwell (Cambridge,
1890), Vol. II, p. 742.

INTRODUCTION 32

and not as a historian or a sociologist or even a householder, he was
restricting the range of his fancy. Commercially, historically, humanly,
the telephone was exciting; and its possibilities as an instrument of
communication and even of torture surely might have opened vistas to
the imagination. But within his self -limited sphere of concern, that of
physics, Maxwell was speaking with a certain stubborn daring about
the intellectual interest in the matter. For him, thinking as a physicist,
the new instrument offered no possibilities for play.

One may well ask if there is not a certain fatal contradiction be
tween these two qualities of the intellectual temperament, playfulness
and piety. Certainly there is a tension between them, but it is any
thing but fatal: it is just one of those tensions in the human character
that evoke a creative response. It is, in fact, the ability to compre
hend and express not only different but opposing points of view, to
identify imaginatively with or even to embrace within oneself contrary
feelings and ideas that gives rise to first-rate work in all areas of
humanistic expression and in many fields of inquiry. Human beings
are tissues of contradictions, and the life even of the intellectual is
not logic, to borrow from Holmes, but experience. Contemplate the in
tellectuals of the past or those in one s neighborhood: some will come
to mind in whom the note of playfulness is dominant; others who are
conspicuously pious. But in most intellectuals each of these character
istics is qualified and held in check by the other. The tensile strength
of the thinker may be gauged by his ability to keep an equipoise
between these two sides of his mind. At one end of the scale, an
excess of playfulness may lead to triviality, to the dissipation of intel
lectual energies on mere technique, to dilettantism, to the failure of
creative effort. At the other, an excess of piety leads to rigidity, to
fanaticism, to messianism, to ways of life which may be morally mean
or morally magnificent but which in either case are not the ways of
intellect. 4

Historically, it may be useful to fancy playfulness and piety as being

4 It was part of the indictment by Julien Benda in La Trahison de$ Clercs
(1927) that so many modern intellectuals had given themselves over to this kind
of messianic politics to the grave loss of intellectual values: "Today, if we mention
Mommsen, Treitschke, Ostwald, Bruneti&re, Barren, Lemaitre, P^guy, Maurras,
d Annunzio, Kipling, we have to admit that the clerks now exercise political pas
sions with all the characteristics of passion the tendency to action, the thirst for
immediate results, the exclusive preoccupation with the desired end, the scorn for
argument, the excess, the hatred, the fixed ideas." (Translated by Hichard Alding
ton as The Betrayal of the Intellectuals, Boston, 1955, p. 32. )

33 On the Unpopularity of Intellect

the respective residues of the aristocratic and the priestly backgrounds
of the intellectual function. The element of play seems to be rooted
in the ethos of the leisure class, which has always been central in the
history of creative imagination and humanistic learning. The element
of piety is reminiscent of the priestly inheritance of the intellectuals:
the quest for and the possession of truth was a holy office. As their
legatee, the modern intellectual inherits the vulnerability of the aristo
crat to the animus of puritanism and egalitarianism and the vulner
ability of the priest to anticlericalism and popular assaults upon
hierarchy. We need not be surprised, then, if the intellectual s position
has rarely been comfortable in a country which is, above all others,
the home of the democrat and the antinomian.

It is a part of the intellectual s tragedy that the things he most values
about himself and his work are quite unlike those society values in
him. Society values him because he can in fact be used for a variety of
purposes, from popular entertainment to the design of weapons. But
it can hardly understand so well those aspects of his temperament
which I have designated as essential to his intellectualism. His play
fulness, in its various manifestations, is likely to seem to most men a
perverse luxury; in the United States the play of the mind is perhaps
the only form of play that is not looked upon with the most tender
indulgence. His piety is likely to seem nettlesome, if not actually dan
gerous. And neither quality is considered to contribute very much to
the practical business of life.

* 3 *

I have suggested that one of the first questions asked in America about
intellect and intellectuals concerns their practicality. One reason "why
anti-intellectualism has changed in our time is that our sense of the
impracticality of intellect has been transformed. During the. nineteenth
century, when business criteria dominated American culture_&laaQst
wih.Q^^ andwEen most business and professional men at

tained eminence without much formal education, academic schooling
was often said to be useless. It was assumed that schooling existed
not to cultivate certain distinctive qualities of mind but to make per
sonal advancement possible. For this purpose, an immediate engage
ment with the practical tasks of life was held to be more usefully
educative, whereas intellectual and cultural pursuits were called un-

INTRODUCTION 34

worldly, unmasculine, and impractical. In spite of the coarse and
philistine rhetoric in which this contention was very often stated, it
had a certain rude correspondence to the realities and demands of
American life. This skepticism about formally cultivated intellect lived
on into the twentieth century. But in our time, of course, American
society has grown greatly in complexity and in involvement with the
rest of the world. In most areas of life a formal training has become a
prerequisite to success. At the same time, the complexity of modern
life has steadily -whittled away the functions the ordinary citizen can
intelligently and comprehendingly perform for himself. In the origi
nal American populistic dream, the omnicompetence of the common
man was fundamental and indispensable. It was believed that he
could, without much special preparation, pursue the professions and
run the government. Today he knows that he cannot even make his
breakfast without using devices, more or less mysterious to him, which
expertise has put at his disposal; and when he sits down to breakfast
and looks at his morning newspaper, he reads about a whole range of
vital and intricate issues and acknowledges, if he is candid with
himself, that he has not acquired competence to judge most of them.

In the practical world of affairs, then, trained intelligence has come
to be recognized as a force of overwhelming importance. What used
to be a jocular and usually benign ridicule of intellect and formal
training has turned into a malign resentment of the intellectual in his
capacity as expert. The old idea of the woolly-minded intellectual, so
aptly caught in the stereotype of the absent-minded professor, still
survives, of course; but today it is increasingly a wishful and rather
wistful defense against a deep and important fear. Once the intel
lectual was gently ridiculed because he was not needed; now he is
fiercely resented because he is needed too much. He has become all
too practical, all too effective. He is the object of resentment because
of an improvement, not a decline, in his fortunes. It is not his ab-
stractness, futility, or helplessness that makes him prominent enough
to inspire virulent attacks, but his achievements, his influence, his real
comfort and imagined luxury, as well as the dependence of the com
munity upon his skills. Intellect is resented as a form of power or
privilege.

It may be said at once that what we really have in mind here is
not so much the intellectual as the expert; that many intellectuals are
not experts with an important role in public life and that many o

35 On the Unpopularity of Intellect

them do not impinge very forcefully upon the public consciousness. 5
This is beyond argument; but my point is that tie prevailing attitude
toward intellectuals is set largely by those intellectuals who do so
impinge. In the main, rnf^lj^fn^g ^flEW^f tV)^ p^KljV^rnind when they
act^jnjgne of two capacities: as experts or as ideologues. In both ca
pacities they evoke profound, and, in a measure, legitimate, fears and
resentments. Both intensify the prevalent sense of helplessness in our
society, the expert by quickening the public s resentment of being the
object of constant manipulation, the ideologue by arousing the fear of
subversion and by heightening all the other grave psychic stresses that
have come with modernity.

For almost thirty years anyone even moderately informed about
public affairs has had to become aware of the machinery through
which the expert was making himself felt. At first, during the New
Deal the well-publicized brain trust and all the ramifying agencies of
control were set up to cope with the depression, and during the war
there were the Office of Strategic Services and the Office of Scientific
Research and Development. Today the C.I.A., the A.E.C., the Rand
Corporation, the President s Council of Economic Advisers, and all the
agencies that conduct research on the instruments and strategy of war
deal with issues which are beyond the reach of the ordinary man s
scrutiny but which can, and often do, determine his fate. A large seg
ment of the public willingly resigns itself to political passivity in a
world in which it cannot expect to make well-founded judgments. But
in the management of public affairs and private business, where small
politicians and small businessmen used to feel that most matters were
within their control, these men have been forced, since the days of
F.D.R., to confront better educated and more sophisticated experts,
to their continuing frustration. Along with the general public, such
men now take part less vitally and less knowledgeably in the making of
important decisions; the less they understand the inner world of
power, the more apt they are to share and arouse popular suspicions
of the uses to which power is put. The small-town lawyers and busi-

5 A great deal of internal discussion is heard in the intellectual community as to
whether the development of expertise is not also dangerous for intellectuals. The
question has been asked whether the intellectual s position as an expert does not in
fact destroy his intellectual function by reducing him to a mere mental technician.
See, for example, H. Stuart Hughes: "Is the Intellectual Obsolete?" in An Ap
proach to Peace and Other Essays (New York, 1962), chapter 10. I shall return
to this problem in my final chapter.

INTRODUCTION 36

nessmen who are elected to Congress cannot hope to expropriate the
experts from their central advisory role, but they can achieve a kind
of revenge through Congressional investigation and harassment, and,
understandably, they carry on this task full of a sense of virtuous mis
sion. There have been, after all, innumerable defeats and failures of
expert-initiated policy, and these failures loom in the eyes of millions
as the consequences not simply of human error but of cold and cynical
manipulation, conspiracy, even treason. The public careers of Alger
Hiss and others have given them symbols to which this feeling can be
attached, and a few spectacular instances of demonstrated espionage
involving scientific knowledge seem to substantiate their image of a
world run by the power of secrets and swarming with the stealers of
secrets. 6

The advice of experts in the physical sciences, however suspect
many of these experts may be, is accepted as indispensable. Expertise
in the social sciences, on the other hand, may be rejected as gratuitous
and foolish, if not ominous. One Congressman objected in these words
to including the social sciences in the National Science Foundation: 7

Outside of myself, I think everyone else thinks he is a social
scientist. I am sure that I am not, but I think everyone else seems
to believe that he has some particular God-given right to decide
what other people ought to do. . . . The average American does
not want some expert running around prying into his life and
his personal affairs and deciding for him how he should live, and
if the impression becomes prevalent in the Congress that this
legislation is going to establish some sort of an organization in
which there would be a lot of short-haired women and long-haired
men messing into everybody s personal affairs and lives, inquiring
whether they love their wives or do not love them and so forth,
you are not going to get your legislation.

From the politician s point of view, experts were irritating enough
in the time of F.D.R., when they seemed to have free access to the
White House while the President kept the politicians at arm s length.
The situation has grown worse in the age of the cold war, when mat-

6 The atmosphere in which popular politicians confront experts has been ex
plored with much insight by Edward Shils: The Torment of Secrecy (Glencoe,
Illinois, 1956).

7 Testimony before a subcommittee of the Committee on Interstate and Foreign
Commerce, House of Representatives, 79th Congress, 2nd session, May 2,8 and 29,
1946, pp. 11, 13.

37 On the Unpopularity of Intellect

ters of the highest public interest are susceptible to judgment only by
specialists. All this is the more maddening, as Edward Shils has
pointed out, in a populistic culture which has always set a premium
on government by the common man and through the common judg
ment and which believes deeply in the sacred character of publicity.
Here the politician expresses what a large part of the public feels.
The citizen cannot cease to need or to be at the mercy of experts, but
he can achieve a kind of revenge by ridiculing the wild-eyed profes
sor, the irresponsible brain truster, or the mad scientist, and by ap
plauding the politicians as they pursue the subversive teacher, the
suspect scientist, or the allegedly treacherous foreign-policy adviser.
There has always been in our national experience a type of mind
which elevates hatred to a kind of creed; for this mind, group hatreds
take a place in politics similar to the class struggle in some other mod
ern societies. Filled with obscure and ill-directed grievances and
frustrations, with elaborate hallucinations about secrets and con
spiracies, groups of malcontents have found scapegoats at various times
in Masons or abolitionists, Catholics, Mormons, or Jews, Negroes or
immigrants, the liquor interests or the international bankers. In the
succession of scapegoats chosen by the followers of this tradition of
Know-Nothingism, the intelligentsia have at last in our time found a
place.

If some large part of the anti-intellectualism of our time stems from
the public s shock at the constant insinuation of the intellectual as ex
pert into public affairs, much of the sensitiveness of intellectuals to
their reputation as a class stems from the awkward juxtaposition of
their sacred and profane roles. In his sacred role, as prophet, scholar,
or artist, the intellectual is hedged about by certain sanctions im
perfectly observed and respected of course, but still effective: he has
his privacy, perhaps his anonymity, in the interstices of modern ur
ban civilization; he commands a certain respect for what seem to be his
self-denying qualities; he benefits, if he is an academic, from the im
perfectly established but operative principle of academic freedom; he
has foundations, libraries, publishing houses, museums, as well as uni
versities, at his service. There is a certain measured and genteel dig
nity about his life. If, in his capacity as expert, he assumes a profane
role by mixing in public affairs, he may be horrified to realize that,
having become a public figure, he too is vulnerable to the low ethics
of controversy which prevail in our politics and the low regard for
privacy which governs our entire society. He may even forget that

INTRODUCTION 38

the malice and slander to winch he is exposed are not peculiarly di
rected against him or his kind but are of the same order as almost any
working politician of prominence may experience; even some of our
greatest statesmen among them Jefferson, Lincoln, and Franklin D.
Roosevelt were not immune. As Emerson once asked: "Is it not the
first attribute and distinction of an American to be abused and slan
dered as long as he is heard of ?" 8

* 4 "

Compared with the intellectual as expert, who must be accepted even
-when he is feared, the intellectual as ideologist is an object of un
qualified suspicion, resentment, and distrust. The expert appears as a
threat to dominate or destroy the ordinary individual, but the ideolo
gist is widely believed to have already destroyed a cherished American
society. To understand the background of this belief, it is necessary
to recall how consistently the intellectual has found himself ranged
in politics against the right-wing mind. This is, of course, no peculiarity
of American politics. The modern idea of the intellectuals as con
stituting a class, as a separate social force, even the term intellectual
itself, is identified with the idea of political and moral protest. In the
broadest signification of the term, there have always been intellectuals,
but until the emergence of industrial society and of a kind of market
place for ideas, there was little sense of the separateness of the in
tellectual life as a vocation, and relatively little need for the solidarity,
much less for the mobilization, of the intellectuals. Thus, for all that
they did in the mid-nineteenth century to prepare the way for the
Revolutions of 1848, the liberation of the serfs in Russia, or of the
slaves in America, there was still at that time no device widely in use
in English to account for them as a group.

The term intellectual first came into use in France. It was soon ex
ported at the time of the Dreyfus case, when so large a part of the
intellectual community was aroused to protest against the anti-Dreyfus
conspiracy and became involved in an ideological holy war on the
French reactionaries. 9 At that time the term came to be used by both

8 Journals (Boston, 1909-1914), Vol. IX (July a.86a), p. 436.

9 On the precursors of the term intellectual, and its early use In France, see
Victor Bromoert: The Intellectual Hero, chapter a. The corresponding Russian
term, intelligentsia, which came into use after the middle of the nineteenth cen
tury, originally meant members of the free professions, but it, too, soon took on the
connotation of an opponent of the regime. See Hugh Seton- Watson: "The Russian

Encounter (September, 1955), pp. 4350.

39 On the Unpopularity of Intellect

sides by the right as a kind o insult, by the Dreyfusard intellectuals
as a proud banner. "Let us use this word/ wrote one of them in 1898,
"since it has received high consecration." In the following year William
James wrote, in a letter referring to the role of the French intellec
tuals in the Dreyfus affair: "We Intellectuals in America must all work
to keep our precious birthright of individualism, and freedom from
these institutions [church, army, aristocracy, royalty]. Every great in
stitution is perforce a means of corruption whatever good it may also
do. Only in the free personal relation is full ideality to be f ound." * It
is significant in our own history that this early use of the term the first
in America of which I am aware should have been made in the
context of just such a "radical," Utopian, and anti-institutional state
ment of purpose. At least from the Progressive era onward, the politi
cal commitment of the majority of the intellectual leadership in the
United States has been to causes that might be variously described as
liberal (in the American use of that word), progressive, or radical. 2
(Of course the American political spectrum is rather foreshortened,
and its center lies considerably to the right of that of France, but the
position of the intellectuals in relation to the center has been similar. )
I am not denying that we have had a number of conservative intel
lectuals and even a few reactionary ones; but if there is anything that
could be called an intellectual establishment in America, this estab
lishment has been, though not profoundly radical (which would be
unbecoming in an establishment), on the left side of center. And it
has drawn the continuing and implacable resentment of the right,
which has always liked to blur the distinction between the moderate
progressive and the revolutionary.

As long as the progressivism of the intellectual community remained
more or less in harmony with a spirit of protest widely shared by the
general public, as it did notably during the Progressive era and the
New Deal, its vulnerability to the extreme right has been small. But
the allegiance of a large part of the intellectual community to Com
munism and fellow-traveling in the 1930*5 gave hostage to its right-
wing enemies. Here it is important to do justice to a signal element of
reality in the anti-intellectuals* case. It will not do to say that the

1 The Letters of William James (Boston, 19^0), Vol. II, pp. 100 i.

2 On this commitment and its effects, see Seymour M. Lipset: "American Intel
lectuals: Their Politics and Status," Daedalus (Summer, 1959), pp. 460-86. Lipset
has many pertinent remarks on the position of American intellectuals, but I am
not persuaded by his argument that their status can be described, without qualifi
cation, as high.

INTRODUCTION 40

vulnerability o the intellectuals on this count has already been vastly
overexploited in right-wing propaganda; or that the extent of Com
munist sympathies among the intellectuals of the 1930*5 has been exag
gerated; or even that the most decisively influential intellectuals of
the past generation were not Communists or fellow travelers. All these
propositions are true, but the case that has been so insistently made
against the intellectuals rests on the fact that the appeal of Commu
nism during the 1930*8 was stronger among intellectuals than among
any other stratum of the population; and that in a few spectacular in
stances faith in Communism led to espionage. One must begin, I
believe, with the awareness that the intellectual and moral incon
sistencies of Communism and fellow-traveling not only put into the
hands of the anti-intellectuals a powerful weapon, but that the sense
of shame over past credulity and of guilt over past political involve
ments induced in many intellectuals a kind of paralysis that caused
them to be helpless in the face of the Great Inquisition of the 1950*5
and even at times to indulge in bitter mutual recriminations. One re
members, for example, with some pain and difficulty, that in August
1939, on the eve of the Nazi-Soviet pact, some four hundred liberal
intellectuals appended their signatures to a manifesto denouncing the
"fantastic falsehood that the U.S.S.R. and the totalitarian states are
basically alike/ and describing the Soviet Union as a "bulwark" of
peace. This document was reproduced in the Nation the week that the
Hitler-Stalin pact was signed. 3 Intellectuals thus caught out were not
in the best historical, moral, or psychological position to make a vigor
ous response to McCarthyism.

What I believe is important, however, to anyone who hopes to un
derstand the impulse behind American anti-intellectualism is that
: this grievance against intellectuals as ideologues goes far beyond any
reproaches based on actual Communism or fellow-traveling. The prac
tical intellectuals of the New Deal Rexford Guy Tugwell is the best
example who had nothing to do with the Communists were as ob
jectionable as the fellow travelers. And today, when Communism has
been reduced to a negligible quantity in American domestic life, the
cry for a revival of this scapegoat is regularly heard in the land, and
investigators who are unable to turn up present Communist affiliations
have resorted to stirring up the dead husks of fellow-traveling memo
ries or to obscuring as completely as possible the differences between

a Sfctfion, Vol. 149 (August 19, 1939), p. aa8.

4i On the Unpopularity of Intellect

liberals and Communists. The truth is that the right-winger needs his
Communists badly, and is pathetically reluctant to give them up. 4
The real function of the Great Inquisition of the 1950*5 was not any
thing so simply rational as to turn up spies or prevent espionage (for
which the police agencies presumably are adequate ) or even to expose
actual Communists, but to discharge resentments and frustrations, to
punish, to satisfy enmities whose roots lay elsewhere than in the Com
munist issue itself. This was why it showed such a relentless and in
discriminate appetite for victims and why it seemed happier with re
spectable and powerful targets than with the occasional obscure Bol
shevik it turned up. The McCarthyist fellow travelers who announced
that they approved of the senator s goals even though they disap
proved of his methods missed the point: to McCarthy *s true believers
what was really appealing about him were his methods, since his goals
were always utterly nebulous. To them, his proliferating multiple ac
cusations were a positive good, because they widened the net of sus
picion and enabled it to catch many victims who were no longer, or
had never been, Communists; his bullying was welcomed because it
satisfied a craving for revenge and a desire to discredit the type of
leadership the New Deal had made prominent.

Had the Great Inquisition been directed only against Communists,
it would have tried to be more precise and discriminating in its search
for them: in fact, its leading practitioners seemed to care little for the
difference between a Communist and a unicorn. Real Communists
were usually too insignificant to warrant lengthy pursuit; McCarthy
did not trouble himself much over an obscure radical dentist promoted
by the army when he could use the case to strike at the army itself,
and beyond the army at the Eisenhower administration. The inquisi
tors were trying to give satisfaction against liberals, New Dealers, re
formers, internationalists, intellectuals, and finally even against a Re
publican administration that failed to reverse liberal policies. What
was involved, above all, was a set of political hostilities in which the
New Deal was linked to the welfare state, the welfare state to social
ism, and socialism to Communism. In this crusade Communism was
not the target but the weapon, and it is for this reason that so many
of the most ardent hunters of impotent domestic Communists were

4 This reluctance has been nowhere more candidly and ingratiatingly expressed
than by Senator Barry Goldwater, who affirmed in July 1959: "I am not willing
to accept the idea that there are no Communists left in this country; I think that
if we lift enough rocks, we will find some/* Quoted by James Wechsler: Reflec
tions of an Angry Middle-Aged Editor (New York, 1960), p. 44.

K 42

altogether indifferent to efforts to meet the power o international
Communism where it really mattered in the arena of world politics.

The deeper historical sources of the Great Inquisition are best re
vealed by the other enthusiasms of its devotees: hatred of Franklin D.
Roosevelt, implacable opposition to New Deal reforms, desire to banish
or destroy the United Nations* anti-Semitism, Negrophobia, isolation
ism, a passion for the repeal of the income tax, fear of poisoning by
fluoridation of the water system, opposition to modernism in the
churches. McCarthy s own expression, "twenty years of treason/ sug
gested the long-standing grievances that were nursed by the crusaders,
though the right-wing spokesman, Frank Chodorov, put it in better
perspective when he said that the betrayal of the United States had
really begun in 1913 with the passage of the income-tax amendment.

Clearly, something more is at stake for such people than the heresies
of the 1930*5 and the security problems of the cold Avar something
more even than the terrible frustration of the Korean War: the Mc-
Carthyist era brought to a head several forces engaged in a long
standing revolt against modernity. The older America, until the 1890*5
and in some respects until 1914, was wrapped in the security of con
tinental isolation, village society, the Protestant denominations, and a
flourishing industrial capitalism. But reluctantly, year by year, over
several decades, it has been drawn into the twentieth century and
forced to cope -with its unpleasant realities: first the incursions of cos
mopolitanism and skepticism, then the disappearance of American iso
lation and easy military security, the collapse of traditional capitalism
and its supplementation by a centralized welfare state, finally the un
relenting costs and stringencies of the Second World War, the Korean
War, and the cold war. As a consequence, the heartland of America,
filled with people who are often fundamentalist in religion, nativist in
prejudice, isolationist in foreign policy, and conservative in economics,
has constantly rumbled with an underground revolt against all these
tormenting manifestations of our modern predicament.

One cannot, even if one does not like their responses, altogether
withhold one s sympathies from the plight of a people, hitherto so pre
occupied with internal material development and in many ways so
simple, who have been dragged away from their "normal" concerns,
thrust into an alien and demanding world, and forced to try to learn
so much in so short a time. Perhaps the truly remarkable thing about
the most common American response to the modern world has been its
patience and generosity. Within only two generations the village

43 On the Unpopularity of Intellect

Protestant individualist culture still so widely observable before the
First World War was repeatedly shocked by change. It had to confront
modernism in religion, literature, and art, relativity in morals, racial
equality as a principle of ethics and public law, and the endless sexual
titillation of our mass communications. In rapid succession it was
forced to confront Darwinism {vide the Scopes trial), Freudianism,
Marxism, and Keynesianism, and to submit in matters of politics, taste,
and conscience to the leadership of a new kind of educated and
cosmopolitan American.

The intellectual as ideologist, having had a leading role in purveying
to the country each innovation and having frequently hastened the
country into the acceptance of change, is naturally felt to have played
an important part in breaking the mold in which America was cast, and
in consequence he gets more than his share of the blame. In earlier
days, after all, it had been our fate as a nation not to have ideologies
but to be one. As European antagonisms withered and lost their mean
ing on American soil in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the
new nation came to be conceived not as sharing the ideologies which
had grown out of these antagonisms but as offering an alternative to
them, as demonstrating that a gift for compromise and plain dealing, a
preference for hard work and common sense, were better and more
practical than commitments to broad and divisive abstractions. The
great American failure, in this respect, the one capitulation to divisive
convictions, resulted in the Civil War; and this had the effect of con
firming the belief that it was better to live without too much faith in
political abstractions and ideological generalities. Americans con
tinued to congratulate themselves on their ability to get on without the
benefit of -what are commonly called "foreign isms," just as they had
always congratulated themselves on their ability to steer clear of Euro
pean "corruption" and "decadence."

But in the past few decades the American public has become pain
fully aware that the breakdown of political and military isolation en
tails a breakdown of intellectual isolationism, that there are at large in
the world powerful forces called ideologies whose consequences we
cannot escape, that millions of people are everywhere set in motion by
convictions about colonialism, racism, nationalism, imperialism, social
ism, communism, and fascism. In all this there is a certain irony that we
are ill-equipped to appreciate. The original American hope for the
world in so far as the older America thought about the world at all
was that it might save itself by emulating the American system

INTRODUCTION 44

that is, by dropping formal ideologies, accepting our type of democ
racy, applying itself to work and the arduous pursuit of happiness, and
by f ollowing the dictates of common sense. The irony is that Americans
now suffer as much from the victory as from the defeat of their aspira
tions. What is it that has taken root in the world, if it is not the spirit of
American activism, the belief that life can be made better, that
colonial peoples can free themselves as the Americans did, that
poverty and oppression do not have to be endured, that backward
countries can become industrialized and enjoy a high standard of
living, that the pursuit of happiness is everybody s business? The very
colonial countries that belligerently reject our leadership try to follow
our example, and the Russians themselves in the midst of their chal
lenge to American power have not ceased to admire American indus
trialization. But this emulation has become tinted with ideologies we
do not recognize and has brought consequences we never anticipated.
The American example of activism has been imitated: what we call
the American way of life has not.

To the most insular type of American mind it seemed that only
peoples blinded by abstractions and dead to common sense could fail
to see and appropriate all the virtues of the American system, and that
some fatal complex of moral weaknesses has prevented the systems of
foreign societies from working, not least of these being the acceptance
of sinister ideologies. But the persistent strength of the Soviet Union,
capped by the Sputnik and other triumphs in space, has given a rude
shock to this confidence, for the United States is now confronted by a
material power strong enough to pose a perpetual and indestructible
challenge. What is more, this material power has unmistakably grown
up under the stimulus of one of those fatal foreign isms. The American,
so ill at ease in this strange, threatening, and seemingly gratuitous
world of ideology, suspects the intellectual for being at home in it. The
intellectual is even imagined to have called it into being and in a
certain sense he has. Inevitably, he has been made to bear some share
of the irritation of those who cannot believe that the changes of the
twentieth century are consequences of anything but a sinister cam
paign of manipulation and design, or at the very least of a series of
fatally stupid errors. Perhaps it is he who has shorn us of the qualities
upon which our former strength depended. Certainly he has become a
figure in the world just at the time when all these unhappy changes
have taken place. If he is not exactly guilty, he will still bear watching.

45 On the Unpopularity of Intellect

* 5

To those who suspect that intellect is a subversive force in society, it
will not do to reply that intellect is really a safe, bland, and emollient
thing. In a certain sense the suspicions Tories and militant philistines
are right: intellect is dangerous. Left free, there is nothing it will not
reconsider, analyze, throw into question. 5 "Let us admit the case of the
conservative," John Dewey once wrote. "If we once start thinking no
one can guarantee what will be the outcome, except that many objects,
ends and institutions will be surely doomed. Every thinker puts some
portion of an apparently stable world in peril, and no one can wholly
predict what will emerge in its place." 6 Further, there is no way of
guaranteeing that an intellectual class will be discreet and restrained in
the use of its influence; the only assurance that can be given to any
community is that it will be far worse off if it denies the free uses of the
power of intellect than if it permits them. To be sure, intellectuals,
contrary to the fantasies of cultural vigilantes, are hardly ever sub
versive of a society as a whole. But intellect is always on the move
against something: some oppression, fraud, illusion, dogma, or interest
is constantly falling under the scrutiny of the intellectual class and be
coming the object of exposure, indignation, or ridicule.

In the course of generations, those who have suffered from the opera
tions of intellect, or who have feared or resented it, have developed a
kind of counter-mythology about what it is and the role it plays in
society. Those who have made their case against intellect in our time
have not found it necessary to originate a single new argument, since
this mythology is deeply rooted in our historical experience. The chap
ters that follow illustrate in some detail how this mythology has grown
and perpetuated and expressed itself in the United States. But here I
should like to state briefly and in general terms what are the perennial
assumptions of the anti-intellectualist case, and in what light I think
it ought to be regarded.

The case against intellect is founded upon a set of fictional and
wholly abstract antagonisms. Intellect is pitted against feeling, on the

5 And even, it appears, when not left free; witness the considerable intellectual
underground that seems to have grown up in the Soviet Union and its Eastern
European satellites.

6 Characters and Events ( New York, 1929 ), p. xi.

INTRODUCTION 46

ground that it is somehow inconsistent with warm emotion. It is pitted
against character, because it is widely believed that intellect stands for
mere cleverness, which transmutes easily into the sly or the diabolical. 7
It is pitted against practicality, since theory is held to be opposed to
practice, and the "purely * theoretical mind is so much disesteemed. It
is pitted against democracy, since intellect is felt to be a form of
distinction that defies egalitarianism. Once the validity of these antago
nisms is accepted, then the case for intellect, and by extension for the
intellectual, is lost. Who cares to risk sacrificing warmth of emotion,
solidity of character, practical capacity, or democratic sentiment in
order to pay deference to a type of man who at best is deemed to be
merely clever and at worst may even be dangerous?

Of course the fundamental fallacy in these fictional antagonisms is
that they are based not upon an effort to seek out the actual limits of
intellect in human life but rather upon a simplified divorce of intellect
from all the other human qualities with which it may be combined.
Neither in the development of the individual character nor in the
course of history are problems posed in such a simple or abstract
fashion. For the same reason it would be pointless to accept the form
in which the challenge is put and attempt to make a defense of
intellect as against emotion or character or practicality. Intellect needs
to be understood not as some kind of a claim against the other human
excellences for which a fatally high price has to be paid, but rather as
a complement to them without which they cannot be fully consum
mated. Few rational men care to deny that the exercise of intellectual
power is one of the fundamental manifestations of human dignity or
that it is at the very least a legitimate end among the other legitimate
ends of life. If mind is seen not as a threat but as a guide to emotion, if
intellect is seen neither as a guarantee of character nor as an inevitable
danger to it, if theory is conceived as something serviceable but not

7 "We always preferred an ignorant bad man to a talented one," wrote B, R.
Hall of early Indiana society, "and hence attempts were usually made to ruin the
moral character of a smart candidate; since unhappily smartness and wickedness
were supposed to be generally coupled, and incompetence and goodness." Bay-
nard R. Hall: The New Purchase, or Seven and a Half Years in the Far West
(1843; ed. Princeton, 1916), p. 170. This occurred even among the Puritans, for
all their rationalism and intellectualism. Cf, John Cotton: "The more learned and
witty you bee, the more fit to act for Satan will you bee. . . . Take off the fond
doting . . . upon the learning of the Jesuites, and the glorie o the Episcopacy,
and brave estate of the Prelates. I say bee not deceived with these pompes, and
empty shewes, and faire representations of a goodly condition before the eyes of
flesh and blood, bee not taken with the applause of these persons." The Powring
Outo$$ie Seven Vials ( London, 1642 ) , The Sixth Vial, pp. 39-40.

47 On the Unpopularity of Intellect

necessarily subordinate or inferior to practice, and if our democratic
aspirations are defined in such realistic and defensible terms as to ad
mit of excellence, all these supposed antagonisms lose their force.
Posed in these rather general terms, this fact may seem obvious; but
historically it has been obvious to all too few; and the purpose of this
book is to trace some of the social movements in our history in which
intellect has been dissevered from its co-ordinate place among the
human virtues and assigned the position of a special kind of vice.

In the first instance, anti-intellectualism must be sought out in the
framework of our religious history. This is not simply because there is a
constant historical tension between rationalism and the requirements
of faith though this in itself is an enduring human problem but be
cause the patterns of modern thought, both religious and secular, are
prefigured in our earlier religious history. To the extent that it becomes
accepted in any culture that religion is largely an affair of the heart
or of the intuitive qualities of mind, and that the rational mind is
irrelevant or worse, so far will it be believed that the rational faculties
are barren or perhaps dangerous. And to the extent that a society is
suspicious of a learned or professional clergy, so far will it be disposed
to repudiate or deprive its intellectual class, whether religious or
secular. In modern culture the evangelical movement has been the
most powerful carrier of this kind of religious anti-intellectualism, and
of its antinomian impulse. Of course, America is not the only society
whose culture has been affected by evangelicalism. But in America
religious culture has been largely shaped by the evangelical spirit, for
here the balance of power between evangelicalism and formal religion
was long ago overwhelmingly tipped in the direction of the former. To
see how much this was true one need only compare the historical
development of religion in Britain, where the Establishment was pre
pared to absorb and domesticate a large part of the evangelical move
ment, with that of America, where the evangelicals rapidly subverted,
outstripped, or overwhelmed the older liturgical churches.

Akin to the spirit of evangelicalism in its effects has been a kind of
primitivism which has won extraordinarily wide credence in Ame^Oa
and which requires special attention here, in part because I have ntot
dealt with it in this book as a separate force. Primitivism has had its
links on one side with Christianity and on another with paganism; and
perhaps some of its pervasive appeal may be attributed to the fact that
through primitivism one may be a Christian and enjoy the luxury of a
touch of paganism; or, contrarywise, that the basically pagan mind may

INTRODUCTION 48

find in primitivism a consoling element of faith. Primitivism has dis
played itself in some quarters as a quest for the spirit of primitive
Christianity, but also as a demand to recover the powers of "nature" in
man; with it one may be close to Nature or to God the difference is
not always wholly clear. But in it there is a persistent preference for
the "wisdom" of intuition, which is deemed to be natural or God-given,
over rationality, which is cultivated and artificial.

In various guises primitivism has been a constantly recurring force
in Western history and in our own national experience. It is likely to
become evident wherever men of the intellectual class itself are disap
pointed with or grow suspicious of the human yield of a rationally
ordered life or when they seek to break away from the routine or
apathy or refinement that arise with civilization. In America primitiv
ism has affected the thinking of many men too educated and cultivated
to run with the frontier revivalists but sympathetic to their underlying
distrust for civilized forms. It is visible in Transcendentalism which
sometimes set itself up as the evangelicalism of the highbrows. 8 It is a

8 Cf. George Ripley in his attack of 1839 on Unitarianism and the Harvard
faculty of divinity: "I have known great and beneficial effects to arise from the
simple exhibition of the truth of the Gospel to the heart and conscience, by
earnest men, who trusted to the intuitive power of the soul, for the perception of
its divinity. . . . Much as I value a sound.^ logic in its proper place, I am sure it is
not the instrument which is mighty through God to the pulling down of the strong
holds of sin. It may detect error; but it cannot give so much as a glimpse of the
glory of Christ. It may refute fallacies; but it cannot bind the heart to the love of
holiness. . . . You maintain, that extensive learning is usually requisite for those
who would influence their fellow men on religious subjects. But Jesus certainly
did not take this into consideration in the selection of the twelve from the mass of
the disciples; he committed the promulgation of his religion to unlearned and
ignorant* men; the sublimest truths were entrusted to the most common minds; and,
in this way, God made foolish the wisdom of the world. . . . Christ . . . saw that
the parade of wisdom, which books impart, was as nothing before the light that
enlighteneth every human mind.* The whole course of his nation s history was an
illustration of the fact that poor mechanics are wont to be God s great ambassadors
to mankind.* . . . Christ established no college of Apostles; he aid not revive the
school of the prophets which had died out; he paid no distinguished respect to
the pride of learning; indeed, he sometimes intimates that it is an obstacle to the
perception of truth; and thanks God, that while he has hid the mysteries of the
kingdom of Heaven from the wise and prudent, he has made them known to men
as ignorant as babes of the lore of the schools." "The Latest Form of Infidelity
Examined/ Letters on the Latest Form of Infidelity (Boston, 1839), pp. 98-9,
111, 112-13.

The argument in this passage is similar to that commonly used by the evangeli
cals. One begins with the hardly contestable proposition that religious faith is not,
in the main, propagated by logic or learning. One moves on from this to the idea
that it is best propagated ( in the judgment of Christ and on historical evidence )
by men who have been unlearned and ignorant. It seems to follow from this that
ifhe kind of wisdom and truth possessed l>y such men is superior to what learned
and cultivated minds have. In fact, learning and cultivation appear to be handicaps

49 On the Unpopularity of Intellect

powerful force in our historical writing from Parkman and Bancroft to
Turner. 9 It is a persistent theme in the attitude of American writers to
ward Indians and Negroes. It rims through the popular legend of
frontier figures such as Daniel Boone and Davy Crockett down to the
heroes of modern Western stories and detective fiction embracing all
those lonely adventurers whose cumulative mythology caused
D. H. Lawrence to say, in one of his harsh., luminous hyperboles, that
the essential American soul is "hard, isolate, stoic, and a killer/* As a
sexual mystique, it has become a powerful moving force in American
letters, taking its most exaggerated form in recent years among those
writers who have been impressed by the theories of Wilhelm Reich. It
has been a force in American politics, and its effects have been visible
in the public images of figures as diverse as Andrew Jackson, John C.
Fremont, Theodore Roosevelt, and D wight D. Eisenhower.

All this is hardly surprising: America was settled by men and women
who repudiated European civilization for its oppressiveness or
decadence, among other reasons, and who found the most striking
thing on the American strand not in the rude social forms that were
taking shape here but in the world of nature and of savages. The es
cape from civilization to Arcadia, from Europe to nature, was perpet
uated in repeated escapes from the East to the West, from the settled
world to the frontier. Again and again the American mind turned
fretfully against the encroachments of organized society, which were
felt to be an effort to reimpose what had been once thrown off; for
civilization, though it could hardly be repudiated in its entirety, was
still believed to have something pernicious about it.

If evangelicalism and primitivism helped to plant anti-intellectualism
at the roots of American consciousness, a business society assured that
it would remain in the foreground of American thinking. Since the
time of Tocqueville it has become a commonplace among students of
America that business activism has provided an overwhelming counter-
in the propagation of faith. And since the propagation of faith is the most im
portant taslc before man, those who are as "ignorant as babes" have, in the most
fundamental virtue, greater strength than men who have addicted themselves to
logic and learning. Accordingly, though one shrinks from a bald statement of the
conclusion, humble ignorance is far better as a human quality than a cultivated
mind. At bottom, this proposition, despite all the difficulties that attend it, has been
eminently congenial both to American evangelicalism and to American democ
racy.

9 On primitivism in Turner, see the penetrating final chapter of Henry Nash,
Smith: Virgin Land (Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1950); there are valuable
gleanings on American primitivism in Charles L. Sanford: The Quest for Paradise
(Urbana, Illinois, 1961).

INTRODUCTION 50

poise to reflection in this country. Tocqueville saw that the life of
constant action and decision which was entailed by the democratic and
businesslike character of American life put a premium upon rough and
ready habits of mind, quick decision, and the prompt seizure of op
portunities and that all this activity was not propitious for delibera
tion, elaboration, or precision in thought. 1

) The overwhelming demands of the task of winning a continent and
establishing its industries drew men from pursuits -where profits and
honors were less available. But there was more to it than this : business
in America at its highest levels appealed not merely to greed and the
lust for power but to the imagination; alluring to the builder, the
gamester, and the ruler in men, it offered more sport than hunting and
more power than politics. As Tocqueville remarked: "In democracies
nothing is greater or more brilliant than commerce," and its devotees
engaged in it, "not only for the sake of the profit it holds out to them,
but for the love of the constant excitement occasioned by that pur
suit." 2 Except in a few older communities, there were no countervail
ing classes or sets of values no aristocracy to marry into, no formidable
body of national aspirations outside business aspirations. Business not
only appealed to vigorous and ambitious men but set the dominant
standards for the rest of society, so that members of the professions
law, medicine, schoolteaching, even the ministry aped businessmen
and adapted the standards of their own crafts to those of business. It
has in fact been one of the perennial complaints of intellectuals in
America that they cannot have much rapport with the professional
classes as such, because these have been swung into the business orbit.
It was business, finally, that isolated and feminized culture by estab
lishing the masculine legend that men are not concerned with the
events of the intellectual and cultural world. Such matters were to be
left to women all too often to the type of women of whom Edith
Wharton said that they were so afraid to meet culture alone that they
hunted it in packs. }

Both our religion and our business have been touched by the per
vasive and aggressive egalitarianism of American life, but the egali
tarian spirit is still more effective in politics and education. 8 What we

1 Democracy in America, Vol. II, pp. 525-6.

2 Ibid., pp. 642-3-

? Observers of American academia have often asked with some bitterness why
athletic distinction is almost universally admired and encouraged whereas intel
lectual distinction is resented. I think the resentment is in fact a kind of back-
hanged tribute democracy pays to the importance of intellect in our affairs. Ath-

5 1 On the Unpopularity of Intellect

loosely call Jacksonian democracy completed the disestablishment o a
patrician leadership that had been losing its grip for some time. At an
early date, literature and learning were stigmatized as the prerogative
of useless aristocracies and the argument was not pressed any the less
firmly because a large part of the American intellectual class actually
supported democratic causes7Q[t seemed to be the goal of the common
man in America to build a society that would show how much could be
done without literature and learning or rather, a society whose litera
ture and learning would be largely limited to such elementary things
as the common man could grasp and use. Hence., early nineteenth-
century America was more noted for a wide range of literacy and for
the unusual amount of information, independence, self-respect, and
public concern possessed by the ordinary citizen than it was for the en
couragement of first-rate science or letters or for the creation of first-
rate universities." 1

Again and again, but particularly in recent years, it has been noticed
that intellect in America is resented as a land of excellence, as a claim
to distinction, as a challenge to egalitarianism, as a quality which al
most certainly deprives a man or woman of the common touch. The
phenomenon is most impressive in education itself. American educa
tion can be praised, not to say defended, on many counts; but I believe
ours is the only educational system in the world vital segments of
which have fallen into the hands of people who joyfully and militantly
proclaim their hostility to intellect and their eagerness to identify with
children who show the least intellectual promise. The final segments of
this book, though necessarily fragmentary as history, will show how
this educational force has been built upon widely accepted premises in
our thinking a narrowly conceived preference for utility and "sci
ence," a false variety of egalitarianism, and a primitivist view of the
child.

letic skill is recognized as being transient, special, and for most of us unimportant
in the serious business of life; and the tribute given the athlete is considered
to be earned because he entertains. Intellect, on the other hand, is neither
entertaining (to most men) nor innocent; since everyone sees that it can be an
important and permanent advantage in life, it creates against itself a kind of uni
versal fraternity of commonplace minds.

PART 2

The Religion of
the Heart

t 55 1
CHAPTER III

The Evangelical Spirit

T

JLm

.HE AMERICAN mind was shaped in the mold of early modern
Protestantism. Religion was the first arena for American intellectual
life, and thus the first arena for an anti-intellectual impulse. Anything
that seriously diminished the role of rationality and learning in early
American religion would later diminish its role in secular culture. The
feeling that ideas should ahove all be made to work, the disdain for
doctrine and for refinements in ideas, the subordination of men of ideas
to men of emotional power or manipulative skill are hardly innovations
of the twentieth century; they are inheritances from American Protes
tantism.

Since some tension between the mind and the heart, between emo
tion and intellect, is everywhere a persistent feature of Christian ex
perience, it would be a mistake to suggest that there is anything
distinctively American in religious anti-intellectualism. Long before
America was discovered, the Christian community was perennially
divided between those who believed that intellect must have a vital
place in religion and those who believed that intellect should be sub
ordinated to emotion, or in effect abandoned at the dictates of emo
tion. I do not mean to say that in the New World a new or more
virulent variety of anti-intellectualist reaction was discovered, but
rather that under American conditions the balance between traditional
establishments and revivalist or enthusiastic movements drastically
shifted in favor of the latter. In consequence, the learned professional
clergy suffered a loss of position, and the rational style of religion they
found congenial suffered accordingly. At an early stage in its history,
America, with its Protestant and dissenting inheritance, became the

THE RELIGION OF THE HEART 56

scene of an unusually keen local variation of this universal historical
struggle over the character of religion; and here the forces of enthusi
asm and revivalism won their most impressive victories. It is to certain
peculiarities of American religious life above all to its lack of firm
institutional establishments hospitable to intellectuals and to the com
petitive sectarianism of its evangelical denominations that American
anti-intellectualism owes much of its strength and pervasiveness.
The style of a church or sect is to a great extent a function of social
class, and the forms of worship and religious doctrine congenial to one
social group may be uncongenial to another. The possessing classes
have usually shown much interest in rationalizing religion and in ob
serving highly developed liturgical forms. The disinherited classes,
especially when unlettered, have been more moved by emotional
religion; and emotional religion is at times animated by a revolt
against the religious style, the liturgy, and the clergy of the upper-
class church, which is at the same time a revolt against aristocratic
manners and morals. 1 Lower-class religions are likely to have apoca
lyptic or millennarian outbursts, to stress the validity of inner religious
experience against learned and formalized religion, to simplify liturgi
cal forms, and to reject the idea of a learned clergy, sometimes of any
professional clergy whatsoeverj

America, having attracted in its early days so many of Europe s
disaffected and disinherited, became the ideal country for the
prophets of what was then known to its critics as religious "enthusi-
asm/\The primary impulse in enthusiasm was the feeling of direct
personal access to God. 2 Enthusiasts did not commonly dispense with
theological beliefs or with sacraments; but, seeking above all an inner
conviction of communion with God, they felt little need either for
liturgical expression or for an intellectual foundation for religious con
viction. They felt toward intellectual instruments as they did toward
aesthetic forms: whereas the established churches thought of art and
music as leading the mind upward toward the divine, enthusiasts
commonly felt them to be at best intrusions and at worst barriers to

1 Cf. H. Richard Niebuhr: "An intellectually trained and liturgically minded
clergy is rejected in favor of lay readers who serve the emotional needs of this
religion (i.e., of the untutored and economically disfranchised classes) more ade
quately and who, on the other hand, are not allied by culture and interest with
those ruling classes whose superior manner of life is too obviously purchased at the
expense of the poor." The Social Sources of E>enorninationalism (Meridian ed.,
1957), p. 30.

2 I owe much in my remarks on this subject to Msgr. R. A. Knox s Enthusiasm
(Oxford, 1950).

57 The Evangelical Spirit

the pure and direct action of the heart though an important excep
tion must be made here for the value the Methodists found in
hymnody. The enthusiasts reliance on the validity of inward experi
ence always contained within it the threat of an anarchical sub
jectivism, a total destruction of traditional and external religious au
thority^)

This accounts, in some measure, for the perennial tendency of
enthusiastic religion toward sectarian division and subdivision. But
enthusiasm did not so much eliminate authority as fragment it; there
was always a certain authority which could be won by this or that
preacher who had an unusual capacity to evoke the desired feeling of
inner conviction. The authority of enthusiasm, then, tended to be
personal and charismatic rather than institutional; the founders of
churches which, like the Methodist, had stemmed from an enthusiastic
source needed great organizing genius to keep their followers under a
single institutional roof. To be sure, the stabler evangelical denomina
tions lent no support to rampant subjectivism. They held that the
source of true religious authority was the Bible, properly interpreted.
But among the various denominations, conceptions of proper interpre
tation varied from those that saw a vital role for scholarship and ra
tional expertise down through a range of increasing enthusiasm and
anti-intellectualism to the point at which every individual could reach
for his Bible and reject the voice of scholarship. After the advent of
the higher criticism, the validity of this Biblical individualism became
a matter of life or death for fundamentalists.

When America was still a tiny outpost of England on the fringes of
Western civilization, movements of religious protest in the mother
country began to display qualities that were to become prominent in
American religion. As the English religious reformers became con
vinced that the Reformation had not gone far enough to meet the so
cial or spiritual demands of their followers, successive waves of Mil-
lennarians, Anabaptists, Seekers, Ranters, and Quakers assailed the
established order and its clergy, preached a religion of the poor,
argued for intuition and inspiration as against learning and doctrine,
elevated lay preachers to leadership, and rejected the professional
clergy as "null and void and without authority." At the time of the
Puritan revolution, the preachers of the New Model Army were un
sparing in their anti-professional and anti-intellectual broadsides
against the clergy, the university teachers, and the lawyers. Most
Puritans, to be sure, were heartily in favor of an educated ministry; but

THE RELIGION OF THE HEART 58

the left-wing chaplains, in the line of the Levellers and Diggers, fol
lowed Gerrard Winstanley s example in calling the universities "stand
ing ponds of stinking waters/* in pointing out that a liberal education
did nothing to make men less sinful, and in stirring the egalitarian
passions of the poor. 3

In America the Anglicans, Presbyterians, and Congregationalists,
with their severe standards of church organization, and their formally
organized and often highly educated clergymen, at first successfully
controlled such leveling tendencies. But hardly had these churches
been organized when some dissenters began to find fault with them.
Many, especially along the Southern frontier, simply drifted away for
a time from all church connections. Others criticized and agitated,
especially in New England, where religious activism was a major
principle of life. For example, before Massachusetts Bay had survived
even its first score of years, it was badly shaken by the activities of
Mistress Anne Hutchinson, whose hostility to the learned ministers and
to university education aroused intense anxiety in the establishment. 4
This unfortunate woman was persecuted in part because of her own
courageous intransigence, but largely because the community was
persuaded that she was thoroughly subversive. Not until the time of
the Great Awakening of the eighteenth century did the enthusiasts
win general major victories outside the confines of a single colony. It
was then that they set the precedent on American shores not only for
the repeated waves of nineteenth-century evangelicalism, but also for
the tradition of anti-intellectualism itself, in so far as this tradition was
carried within the matrix of religious belief. But to understand the
Awakening, one must look at the state of the established clergy in the

3 On the general aspects of the religion of the disinherited, see Niebuhr: op. cit.,
chapters 2, and 3. See Leo Solt s suggestive account of "Anti-Intellectualism in the
Puritan Revolution," Church History, Vol. XXIV (December, 1956), pp. 306-16;
and D. B. Robertson: The Religious Foundations of Leveller Democracy (New
York, 1951 ), especially pp. 519-40.

4 As Samuel Eliot Morison has remarked, such hostility among radical Puritans
was "an article of faith. Sincere fanatics called the universities stews of Anti-
Christ/ Houses of lies/ that *stink before God with the most loathsome abomina
tion/ " Edward Johnson saw Anne Hutchinson "and her consorts mightily rayling
against learning, pers wading all they could to take heed of being spoyled by it.
One of her followers had said to him: "Come along with me. . . . lie bring you
to a Woman that Preaches better Gospell then any of your black-coates that have
been at the Ninneversity, a Woman or another kinde of spirit, who hath had many
Revelations of things to come. ... I had rather hear such a one that speekes from
the meere motion of the spirit, without any study at all, then any of your learned
Scollers, although they may be fuller of Scripture." Edward Johnson: Wonder-
Working Providence of Sions Saviour in Neu? England, ed. by J. F. Jameson (New
York, 3,910), pp. 127-8-

59 The Evangelical Spirit

colonies, and here the position of the Puritan clergy is of special
interest; for the Puritan clergy came as close to being an intellectual
ruling class or, more properly, a class of intellectuals intimately as
sociated with a ruling power as America has ever had.

Like most intellectual groups, the Puritan ministry had serious faults,
and these became dangerous when the ministers wielded power. But
what is significant for us and it may serve as a paradigm of the
situation of the intellectual in America is that the Puritan ministry is
popularly remembered almost entirely for its faults, even for faults for
which it was less culpable than the community in which it lived. It is
significant, moreover, that this rather odious image of the Puritan
clergy, for which the name of Cotton Mather is a byword, has domi
nated not only our popular historical lore but also the historical think
ing of our intellectuals. The reputation of this, the first class of Ameri
can intellectuals, has gone down in infamy, and subsequent
generations of intellectuals have often led the campaign against them.
It is doubtful that any community ever had more faith in the value
of learning and intellect than Massachusetts Bay. It was with only
slight and pardonable exaggeration that Moses Coit Tyler wrote, in his
history of colonial American literature: 5

In its inception New England was not an agricultural commu
nity, nor a manufacturing community, nor a trading community: it
was a thinking community; an arena and mart for ideas; its char
acteristic organ being not the hand, nor the heart, nor the pocket,
but the brain. . . . Probably no other community of pioneers ever
so honored study, so reverenced the symbols and instruments of
learning. Theirs was a social structure with its corner-stone resting
on a book. . . . Only six years after John Winthrop s arrival in
Salem harbor, the people of Massachusetts took from their own
treasury the fund from which to found a university; so that while
the tree-stumps were as yet scarcely weather-browned in their
earliest harvest fields, and before the nightly howl of the wolf had
ceased from the outskirts of their villages, they had made arrange
ments by which even in that wilderness their young men could at
once enter upon the study of Aristotle and Thucydides, of Horace

S A History of American Literature, 16071765 (Ithaca, New York: 1949),
pp. 85-7-

THE RELIGION OF THE HEAHT 60

and Tacitus, and the Hebrew Bible. . . . The learned class was
indeed an order of nobility among them.

Among the first generation of American Puritans, men of learning
were both numerous and honored. There was about one university-
trained scholar, usually from Cambridge or Oxford, to every forty or
fifty families. Puritans expected their clergy to be distinguished for
scholarship, and during the entire colonial period all but five per cent
of the clergymen of the New England Congregational churches had
college degrees. These Puritan emigrants, with their reliance upon the
Book and their wealth of scholarly leadership, founded that intellectual
and scholarly tradition which for three centuries enabled New Eng
land to lead the country in educational and scholarly achievement.

It must not be imagined that the earliest generations of Harvard
graduates were given nothing but a narrow theological education. The
notion has become widespread that Harvard and the other colonial
colleges were at their inception no more than theological seminaries
and the fear expressed by the Puritan fathers of the development of an
"illiterate ministry" seems to give support to the ides^ In fact, however,
the Oxford and Cambridge colleges which trained the men who
founded Harvard College had long since been thoroughly infused with
humanist scholarship. The founding fathers of colonial education saw
no difference between the basic education appropriate for a cleric and
that appropriate for any other liberally educated man. The idea of a
distinctively theological seminary is a product of modern specialism,
sectarian competition, and of a reaction to the threat of secularism in
the collegek Such an idea was outside their ken. They felt the need of
learned ministers more acutely than learned men in other professions,
but they intended their ministers to be educated side by side and in
the same liberal curriculum with other civic leaders and men of
affairs. As it turned out, this was precisely what happened; in Har
vard s first two generations, only about half the graduates became
ministers and the remainder went into secular occupations.

Having established a learned and literary class, the Puritan com
munity gave this class great scope for the realization of their gifts. The
Puritan ministry was well served by the community, and it served
the community well in return. As the country became more settled, the
clergy found sufficient leisure to express themselves in writing; the
productivity shown by some of them is astounding. Puritanism, as a
religion of the Book, placed a strong emphasis upon interpretation and

6i The Evangelical Spirit

rational discourse and eschewed ranting emotionalism. Puritan sermons
combined philosophy, piety, and scholarship; and it was one of the
aims of Puritan popular education to train a laity capable of under
standing such discourses. In the early days, at least, this seems to have
been achieved.

But a great deal more was achieved. In estimating the intellectual
accomplishments of the Puritan colonists it is necessary to bear in mind
that even in 1700, after more than seventy years of settlement, the
population numbered only about 106,000, much of it very thinly
spread; that Boston, the largest town, had only about 7,000 souls in
1699; and that during the 1670*5 they were ravaged by a serious and
costly war with the Indians in which one of every sixteen men of
military age was killed and half their towns suffered damage. Despite
isolation, poverty, and other handicaps, they established a college
which graduated scores of civic leaders and ministers, and whose de
grees soon after its founding -were accepted ad eundem gradem at
Oxford and Cambridge. It was a college, too, where young men
learned not merely to read and interpret the Bible and theological
works, but to read Hesiod, Homer, Sophocles, Aristophanes, and other
classical writers. There is every evidence that the learned class of
Massachusetts Bay became cultivated men, interested in humane
letters as well as theology, and that they successfully brought to the
New World much of the best of the heritage of European civilization.
In addition to Harvard College, their leaders established a system of
grammar and elementary schools, a printing press, and some creditable
libraries. The ministers produced a remarkable literature of sermons,
histories, and verse, and, in time, a literature of political speculation
and controversy which germinated into the political writing of the
Revolutionary era. They laid the basis of an educational system and,
one might add, of a community morale in matters of study which
made New England and the New England mind distinguished in the
history of American culture for three centuries. The clergy spread
enlightenment as well as religion, fostered science as well as theology,
and provided models of personal devotion to things of the mind in
tiny villages where such examples might otherwise not have been
seen. 6

6 For a spirited defense and appreciation of these early cultural achievements,
see Samuel Eliot Morison: The Intellectual Life of Colonial New England (New
York 1956); cf. Thomas G. Wright: Literary Culture in Early New England
(Cambridge, 1920); Kenneth Murdock: Literature and Theology in Colonial New
England ( Cambridge, 1949 )

THE RELIGION OF THE HEART 2,

The most common modern conception of the Puritan clergy is that
they not only shared the faults of their community but also led in its
persecutions. This judgment needs severe qualification. It is true that
theirs was, by the standards of the enlightened modern mind, an
intolerant age, and that the clergy shared its intolerances, j More
over, the clergy displayed, especially in the first generation, a weak
ness to which intellectuals are prone at times in political affairs that
is, they imagined that they might be able to commit an entire civil
society to the realization of transcendent moral and religious standards,
and that they could maintain within this society a unified and com
manding creed. They had risked the Atlantic and the wilderness to
show that this was possible; and of course in the end they failed, after
having committed a number of excesses in the attempt to realize their
vision.^

But the fairest way to assess any intellectual group like the Puritan
ministry is not to put them to the test of the most advanced standards
of tolerance and enlightenment, but to measure them against their
own times, the community in which they lived, and the laymen they
served. The modern liberal mind tends to assume that, as leaders of
the community the clergy were the prime movers in those acts, like the
Salem witchcraft trials, which are most disturbing to our minds; and
that the essential responsibility for the excesses of that community
rests with them.

The truth is more complex. The clergy were themselves not a
homogeneous group, for with the passing of the first generation and
the enlargement of the community they had become diversified. 7 Per
haps the most important points of diversity were those of generation
and of location. The older clergy, and especially those in the more
remote rural communities, clung to the hard orthodoxies in which the
Puritan community had begun. But by the end of the seventeenth
century there had also arisen a group of young clergymen who were
cosmopolitan in outlook, relatively liberal in religious tendency, and
conversant with the latest intellectual influences from Europe. Most of
these ministered to the growing towns of the seaboard.

There is ample evidence that, as an intellectual class, the members
of the more learned and more cosmopolitan clergy (which includes
such men as Increase and Cotton Mather) earned their privileged
position. Their leadership was far from fully effective or controlling;

7 On the state of the clergy during the period 1680-1725, see Clifford K.
Shipton: "The New England Clergy of the Glacial Age/" Colonial Society of
"Publications, Vol. XXXII (Boston, 1937), pp. 34-54.

6a The Evangelical Spirit

but such influence as they had they used to encourage greater toler
ance, a broader pursuit of learning., the cultivation of science, and the
restraint of some of the bigoted tendencies of the leading country
laymen, the public, and the less enlightened clergy. By the close of the
seventeenth century, the leading clergymen were much more liberal
in thought than the elderly uneducated laymen who controlled a great
many of the rural congregations or the provincial politicians who often
invoked religious fundamentalism because it was popular with the
growing electorate.

After 1680, the Puritan ministry was more tolerant and more ac
commodating to dissenters such as Baptists and Quakers than was
the Boston public at large; and the influential Boston ministers
including the Mathers were more liberal in this respect than the
older preachers in the countryside. While the cosmopolitan clerics
were importing the latest latitudinariarj. books from England and year
by year making more departures from the harsher traditions of
Calvinism, leading laymen were often resisting these changes. So far as
the encouragement of science is concerned, this was almost entirely in
clerical sponsorship before about the middle of the eighteenth cen
tury (Harvard had its first lay scientist in Professor John Winthrop,
who began to teach in 1738 ) . In the most controversial and stirring of
all scientific questions of the day, that of the adoption of inoculation
for smallpox, outstanding clerical intellectuals once again took the
lead in defending innovation. Not least of them was Cotton Mather,
who held to his position even though a bomb was thrown into his
study by anti-inoculation agitators. Even with respect to the much-
mooted witchcraft trials, the record of the clergy, though mixed, is
better than that of the lay judges and the public. Most of the clerics
gave credence to the idea of witchcraft itself as did some of the
distinguished minds of the Western world but they were strongly
opposed to the extremely loose criteria of evidence that were admitted
in the terrible Salem trials, and many clerics exercised a restraining
influence. 8

Toward the end of the seventeenth century, certain strains were

8 After the first hanging had taken place and when many suspects were await
ing trial, a group of clergymen wrote to the governor and council pointing to the
"need of a very critical and Exquisite Caution, lest by too much Credulity for
Things received only on the Devils Authority, there be a Door opened for a long
Train of miserable Consequences .** When the lay authorities ignored this protest
and went on accepting what was called "spectral evidence against suspects,
leading ministers continued to complain, and fourteen of them petitioned Governor
Phips. At their insistence Phips began to call a halt to the proceedings. Shipton:
"The New England Clergy," p. 42.

THE RELIGION OF THE HEART 64

already evident in Puritan religions sensibility which affected the lives
and the position of the ministry^ Puritanism had always required a
delicate balance between intellect^which was esteemed as essential to
true religion in New England, and emotion, which was necessary to
the strength and durability of Puritan pietyt This balance proved to
be precarious, and there developed a tendency toward a split in the
religious community itself. One side of the church tended to be socially
correct, and sophisticated, liberal, and latitudinarian in its intellectual
outlook, but religiously cold and formal. The other side, which was to
prove vulnerable to revivalism, was moved both by ideas and by
religious fervor; but its partisans, in their most fervent moments,
turned antinomian and anti-intellectual. Jonathan Edwards stood out
almost alone among the leading clergymen as exemplifying the old
intellectualism and piety of New England and combining with them
the ability to deal creatively with new ideas. By the middle of the
eighteenth century, the religion of New England, like that of the other
colonies, was ripe for an awakening that would have profound conse
quences for the position of the learned clergy.

* 3

The first major episode in which the educated clergy was roundly
repudiated came during the Great Awakening of the mid-eighteenth
century. These religious revivals, to be sure, did not have an un
ambiguously bad effect on intellect and learning; but they set an im
portant precedent for later attacks upon the learned clergy and for
movements to make religion less formal and its leadership less pro
fessional.

The American Awakening was a counterpart of similar religious
changes in Europe, notably the rise of German pietism and English
Methodism, but America was especially ripe for religious reawaken
ing. Large numbers of Americans either were dissenters Baptists, for
instance, living restively under established Anglican or Congregational
churches or were unchurched, without affiliations or the habit of
church attendance. The population had moved beyond the reach of
the ministry, either geographically or spiritually. In some areas, notably
in Virginia, a large portion of the Anglican clergy was especially re
mote and ineffective. Even the religion of New England had cooled.
By the 1730 $ and 1740 $ the Congregational churches of New England
(and often the Presbyterian churches of the Middle Colonies and

65 The Evangelical Spirit

elsewhere ) had lost much of their pristine morale and had settled into
dull repositories of the correct faith of the established classes. Abstract
and highly intellectual in their traditions, they had lost the power to
grip simple people; the Reformation controversies out of which the
doctrinal commitments of these churches had grown had lost much of
their meaning. 9 The zealots of the first Puritan generation and their
well-schooled sons had long since gone to their graves. The ministers
themselves had lost much of the drive, and therefore the prestige, of
their earlier days. They were highly civilized, often versatile men;
but they were in some cases too civilized, too versatile, too worldly, to
play anything like their original role. Their sermons, attended by
sleepy congregations, were often dull and abstruse exercises in old
dogmatic controversies. As the Awakener, George Whitefield, said,
"the reason why Congregations have been so dead is because dead
Men preach to them." * From Massachusetts southward to Virginia and
beyond, the latent religious energies of the people thus lay ready for
ny preacher who had the skill to reach them.

The Great Awakenings began in 1720, when the members of the
Dutch Reformed Church in New Jersey began to be aroused by the
sermons of a young preacher, Theodore Frelinghuysen, who had come
to the New World inspired by English and Dutch Puritanism. His
revival in New Jersey led to a second among the Scotch-Irish Presby
terians of the Middle Colonies. In 1726 one of them, William Tennent,
established at Neshaminy, Pennsylvania, his "Log College/* a sort of
rudimentary theological school, and there, for the next twenty years,
he trained about a score of young men to carry the revivalist spirit
into the Presbyterian ministry. In 1734 revivalism appeared independ
ently in New England. Jonathan Edwards, a unique figure among the
awakening preachers, combined the old Puritan regard for doctrine
and the Puritan custom of the written sermon with the passion and
religious zeal of the revivalists. Edwards s revival sermons, though they
inflamed the town of Northampton and the surrounding country dur
ing 1734 and 1735, were limited in their reach compared with those of
George Whitefield, an eloquent young associate of the Wesleys in
England, who came to America on evangelistic missions in 1738 and

9 Perry Miller has written a brilliant account of the institutional and doctrinal
aspects of this decline in The New England Mind: from Colony to Province
(Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1953).

1 Quoted by Edwin Scott Gaustad: The Great Awakening in New England
( New York, 1957 ) , p. 27.

THE RELIGION OF THE HEART 66

1739. His second campaign began in Georgia and twice brought him
northward; he finally came to New England in the fall o 1740.
Whitefield, who, David Garrick said, could send an audience into
paroxysms by pronouncing "Mesopotamia/* met with a wildly enthu
siastic response to his preaching in America. Thousands flocked from
the countryside to the towns where he chose to talk, and great num
bers were seized with a realization of sin and experienced spiritual
rebirth. Whitefield s first visit to New England was followed by that of
William Tennent s son, Gilbert, who brought the revival to a degree of
frenzy distasteful to many persons who had welcomed the earlier
signs of a spiritual awakening.

Representative of the more enthusiastic antics of revivalism was the
work of James Davenport, a Long Island minister and a graduate of
Yale, who toured Connecticut and Massachusetts in 1742 and 1743,
pouring such invective upon the established ministers and committing
such other outrages upon decorum (singing, for example, on his way
to meeting) that he fell afoul of the authorities. In the summer of 1742
he was tried in Connecticut for breach of the peace under the guise of
holding religious meetings, but was charitably spared graver punish
ment than deportation from the province because he was deemed
"disturbed in the rational Faculties of his Mind." A few months later
he turned up in Boston, where he was jailed for slandering the
ministers, but was again released as non compos mentis, and returned
to Long Island to be tried for neglecting his own parish. After one
more gaudy episode in New London, Connecticut, he was at last
persuaded to quit, and in 1744 he wrote a somewhat inconsistent
testimonial of repentance. The fact that Davenport was repudiated
and sharply condemned by Gilbert Tennent, whose preachings had
helped to unsettle him in the first place, suggests that the middle-
of-the-road awakeners were almost as much alarmed by the barking
and howling that the movement had unleashed as were the regular
ministers. 2

As for the regular ministers, at first the overwhelming majority of
them welcomed the itinerant revivalists as agents who would bring a
warmer spirit to the religion of their parishioners; this welcome was
extended even by such outstanding liberal highbrows as Benjamin
Colman of Boston. It was only after the Awakening was well under

2 On Davenport see Gaustad: op. cit., pp. 36-41. Edwards himself, in his
Treatise Concerning Religious Affections (1746), expressed at length his disap
proval of such manifestations.

67 The Evangelical Spirit

way that the regular ministers began to realize that the awakeners
did not regard them as fellow workers in a common spiritual task but
as competitors and very inferior ones at that.

Gilbert Tennent expressed the revivalists view of the older clergy
(those "orthodox, Letter-learned and regular Pharisees") in a sermon
on The Danger of an Unconverted Ministry; he attacked them as
crafty, cruel, cold-hearted, bigoted, faithless hypocrites who held the
people in contempt. Tennent found the motives and the piety of the
unawakened ministers suspect, and he regarded them not as co-
workers but as enemies. ("If they coud help it, they wo dn t let one
faithful Man come into the Ministry; and therefore their Opposition is
an encouraging Sign.**) Tennent s approach was hardly ingratiating,
but he believed that he was raising a real issue, and it would be hard
to deny that what he was advocating could be called religious
democracy. If, under existing church organization, a congregation had
a cold and unconverted minister, and if it was forbidden to receive an
awakened one except -with the consent of the unconverted, how would
the congregation ever win access to "a faithful Ministry"? 3 Like a true
Protestant, Tennent was once again addressing himself to a major
problem how the faith could be propagated under conditions of
religious monopoly. To the standing ministry, the problem presented
itself in quite another guise: how, under the conditions to which they
were bound by inherited church principles, could they compete with
inspired preachers like Tennent and Whitefield, if these men took it
into their heads to treat the regular ministry as foes?

In truth, the established ministers found it difficult to cope with the
challenge of the awakeners. The regular ministers, living with their
congregations year in and year out under conditions devoid of special
religious excitement, were faced with the task of keeping alive the
spiritual awareness of their flocks under sober everyday circumstances.
Confronted by flaming evangelists of Whitefield s caliber, and even by
such lesser tub-thumpers and foot-stampers as Gilbert Tennent and
Davenport, they were at somewhat the same disadvantage as an
aging housewife whose husband has taken up with a young hussy
from the front line of the chorus. The revivalists, with the prominent
exception of Edwards, who was an intellectual largely out of rapport
with his own congregation, felt little or no necessity to work upon the
reason of their audiences or to address themselves to knotty questions

3 Gilbert Tennent, The Danger of an Unconverted Ministry Considered in a
Sermon on Mark VI, 34 (Boston, 1742), PP- 2-3, 5, 7, 11-13.

THE RELIGION OF THE HEART 68

of doctrine. They dispensed (again one must except Edwards) with
written sermons, and confronted their listeners -with the spontaneity of
direct intercourse. They dealt directly with the ultimate realities of
religious experience the sense of sin, the yearning for salvation, the
hope for God s love and mercy and rarely hesitated to work upon the
sensibilities of the audience; the fits and seizures, the shrieks and
groans and grovelings, the occasional dementia characteristic of later
revivalism made their appearance. Tennent, for instance, commonly
frightened his listeners into conversions, as he stamped up and down
and finally lapsed into incoherence. Performances like his were evi
dently in demand; on his three-months* tour of New England, when he
often preached in foot-deep snow, he sent his converts groveling to
the ground. As Timothy Cutler, a rather prejudiced Anglican witness,
reported it: "After him [Whitefield] came one Tennent a monster!
impudent and noisy and told them all they were damned, damned,
damned! This charmed them; and in the most dreadful winter I ever
saw, people wallowed in snow, night and day, for the benefit of his
beastly brayings; and many ended their days under these fatigues." 4

Before long, it became clear that the extreme exponents of revivals
were challenging every assumption of the settled churches, whether
Congregational, Dutch Reformed, Presbyterian, or Anglican. The
Congregationalists of New England, and their Presbyterian counter
parts elsewhere, had assumed, as I have said, that ministers must be
learned professional men. Traditionally their ministers had com
manded respect not merely for their learning but also for their piety
and their spiritual qualities. But learning was held to be essential be
cause learning and the rational understanding of doctrine were con
sidered vital to religious life. Moreover, the regular churches were
conducted in an orderly fashion. Ministers had to be invited and com
missioned; their relations with their congregations were stable, solemn,
orderly marriages. Unlicensed preachers were not to be thought of, and
uninvited preaching simply was not done.

All these assumptions were now challenged. The most extreme
revivalists were undermining the dignity of the profession by their
personal conduct; they were invading and dividing the allegiances of
the established ministers* congregations; they were trying to discredit

4 L. Tyerman: The Life of the Rev. George Whitefield (London, 1847), Vol. II,
p. 12.5. See Eugene E. White: "Decline of the Great Awakening in New England:
1741 to 1746," New England Quarterly, Vol. XXIV (March, 1951), p. 37.

6g The Evangelical Spirit

the standing ministry by denouncing it as cold and unregenerate; 5
many of them were preaching that not learning but the spirit was impor
tant to salvation; and finally (despite the disapproval of some awaken-
ers like Tennent), they were threatening to undermine the professional
basis of the ministry by commissioning laymen lay exhorters, as they
were called to carry on the work of conversion. Before long many
congregations were split in two; and major denominations like the
Congregationalists and Presbyterians were divided into quarreling fac
tions. Plainly the thing had got out of hand. As Ezra Stiles -recalled
nearly twenty years later: "Multitudes were seriously, soberly and
solemnly out of their wits/ 6

4

It was not long before the awakeners wore out their welcome from the
established ministry. By 1743 the ministers themselves had fallen out
not over such extravagances as the commissioning of laymen or the
uninvited invading of parishes, acts which v^ere defended by no one
of consequence, but over the meaning of the Awakening itself. A
strong minority (perhaps as many as a third) held that, for all its
defects, it was "a happy revival of religion," but the majority had come
to look upon it as a fit of superstitious enthusiasm, an anti-intellectualist
uprising against traditional and rational authority. The most extensive
tract against the awakeners was written by one of their most in
transigent foes, Charles Chauncy, a somewhat stuffy but liberal-
minded leader of the Boston clergy. His Seasonable Thoughts on the
State of Religion in New England, published in 1743, shows his out
rage at the insolence of the upstarts from miscellaneous occupations
who had come to challenge the ministry men totally unqualified but
of overweening pride and assertiveness. The revivals had opened the
door, he complained, to lay exhorters: "Men of all Occupations who are

5 Charles Chauncy compiled a catalogue of some of the epithets Gilbert Tennent
used against the established ministry: "Hirelings; Caterpillars; Letter-Learned
Pharisees; Men of the craft of Foxes, and the Cruelty of Wolves; plaistered Hypo
crites; Varlets; seed of the Serpent; foolish Builders, whom the Devil drives into the
Ministry; dry Nurses; dead Dogs that cannot bark; blind Men; dead Men; Men
possessed of the Devil; Rebels and Enemies of god; Guides that are Stone-blind
and Stone deaf; children of Satan . . . murderous Hypocrites." Seasonable
Thoughts on the State of Religion in New England (Boston, 1743 )> p- 249. Most
of these examples appear to have been taken from Tennent s Danger of an Uncon
verted Ministry.

Gaustad: op. cit., p. 103.

THE RELIGION OF THE HEART 70

vain enough to think themselves fit to be Teachers of others; Men who,
though they have no Learning, and but small Capacities, yet imagine
they are able, and without Study too, to speak to the spiritual Profit of
such as are willing to hear them." 7

"Without study too"! Here we are close to one of the central issues of
the Great Awakening. An error of "former Times * was now being
revived, Chauncy asserted, the error of the heretics and popular
preachers who said that "they needed no Books but the Bible." "They
pleaded there was no Need of Learning in preaching, and that one of
them could by the SPIRIT do better than the Minister by his Learning;
as if the SPIRIT and Learning were Opposites." This, Chauncy
thought, was the fundamental error of the revivalists: 8

Their depending on the Help of the SPIRIT as to despise
Learning. To this it is owing, that so many speak slightly of our
Schools and Colleges; discovering a Good-Will, were it in their
Power, to rase them to their Foundations. To the same Cause it
may be ascribed, that such Swarms of Exhorters have appeared in
the Land, and been admir d and run after, though many of them
could scarce speak common Sense . . . and to the same Cause
still it must be attributed that so many Ministers preach, not only
without Book, but without Study; and justify their doing so, lest,
by previous Preparation, they should stint the Spirit.

To the exponent of a religion of the book, for whom a correct reading
of the Bible was a vital concern, this was the ultimate heresy: that one
who was possessed of the Spirit could, without study and without
learning, interpret the word of God effectively enough to be an agent
of the salvation of others. And here we have the nub of the difference
between the awakeners and the spokesmen of establishments:
whether it was more important to get a historically correct and rational
understanding of the Book and hence of the word of God or to
work up a proper emotion, a proper sense of inner conviction and of
relation to God.

An association of revivalist ministers put their case in these terms: 9

That every brother that is qualified by God for the same has
a right to preach according to the measure of faith, and that the

7 Seasonable Thoughts, p. 2,2,6.

8 Ibid., pp. 256-8.

Leonard W. Labaree: "The Conservative Attitude toward the Great Awaken
ing," William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd ser., Vol. I (October, 1944), pp. 339~4
from Tracy: Great Awakening, p.

71 The Evangelical Spirit

essential qualification for preaching is wrought by the Spirit of
God; and that the knowledge of the tongues and liberal sciences
are not absolutely necessary; yet they are convenient, and -will
doubtless be profitable if rightly used, but if brought in to supply
the want of the Spirit of God, they prove a snare to those that use
them and all that follow them.

Conservatives found in this a complete repudiation of the role of
learning in religion; and in the emotional kind of religion that came
from the preaching of men so disposed, they saw the destruction of
all rationality in religious life. "As none but rational creatures are
capable of religion/* wrote a Southern opponent of evangelism, 1

so there is no true religion but in the use of reason; there will
always be these two things in the former, which the latter must
judge of, namely the Truth and the Meaning. The virtue of our
religion must consist in the inward persuasion of our mind, for
if we owe our religion to birth, humor, interest, or any external
circumstances or motive whatever, we bring all religions upon a
level; and though by the happiness of education we should pro
fess the true religion, yet if we do not make it our own by under
standing the reasons for it, it will not be profitable to us; we offer
to God the Sacrifice of Fools, in which he has no pleasure.

Understandably, many of the conservative ministers in the affected
colonies, who had at first expected good results for religion from the
revivals, soon began to abhor them as a threat to their own position, to
the churches themselves, and to all true religion. Fundamental tenets
were being neglected, the organized ministry was being bypassed
and traduced. Extemporized preaching threatened to dissolve all ra
tional elements in religion, for many of the evangelists admitted that
their preaching came by "the immediate impression of the Holy
Ghost putting a long chain of thoughts into their minds and words into
their mouths." Conservatives considered this bad practice even in a
properly educated minister, but it was much more dangerous in the
lay exhorters, who were "private persons of no education and but low
attainment in knowledge and in the great doctrines of the Gospel/* 2
Finally, not only had these irruptions created divisions and quarrels
within a great many congregations, but the established ministers

1 Quoted by Labaree: op. cit., p. 345, from South Carolina Gazette (September

12-19, 1741)-

2 Ibid., p, 336.

THE RELIGION OF THK HEART 72.

feared that the evangelists would strike at the very source of the
educated ministry by circumventing the colleges and the usual process
of ministerial training.

The fear was exaggerated, but the revivalists had tried to bully the
colleges and at a few moments of extremism they had gone in for
book-burning. Even the moderate Whitefield had urged that certain
books be burned and had succeeded in persuading some of his fol
lowers to commit them to the flames. In March 1743, James Davenport
urged the people of New London to collect for burning their jewelry
and objects of personal luxury, as well as books and sermons written
by Increase Mather, Benjamin dolman, Charles Chauncy, and other
regular ministers. And one Sunday morning a large pyre was con
sumed on the town wharf while Davenport and his followers sang
Gloria Patri and Hallelujah and chanted this invocation: "The smoak
of the torments of such of the authors ... as died in the same belief,
as when they set them out, was now ascending in hell in like manner >
as the smoak of these books rise." 3

The immediate effects of the Awakening on education were mixed.
In an organization like the Presbyterian Church, manned as it was by
many well-trained ministers from the Scottish universities, even a
revivalist was likely to be sensitive to the charge that his work was
hostile to learning. William Tennent trained a number of capable
scholars at his "Log College," and his son Gilbert was not the ignorant
lout that has often been pictured. { More important, the revivalist
Presbyterians established the College of New Jersey (later Princeton)
in 1746, to assure that they would have their own center of learning;
and in time other institutions Brown, Rutgers, and Dartmouth
were founded by men influenced by the revivals^ Only later did the
revivalist tradition become consistently hostile to education., It must be
added, however, that the effect of the Awakening was to subordinate
education to religious factionalism and to consolidate the tradition of
sectarian control of colleges?)What the ardent religious factionalists
wanted most of all were not centers of learning, but their own instru
ments of teaching; they pushed doctrinal and pietistic considerations
forward, at the expense of humane learning. Even the learned
Jonathan Edwards once attacked Harvard and Yale for failing to be
"nurseries of piety" and for taking more pains "to teach the scholars
human learning" than to educate them in religion. 4 )

P^y

8 White: op. cit., p. 44.

4 Works (New York, 1830 ), Vol. IV, pp. 264-5.

73 The Evangelical Spirit

Whitefield himself, another responsible evangelist, was also dis
satisfied with the two New England colleges. The light o these col
leges, he complained, had become "darkness, darkness that may be
felt/* When he returned to New England in 1744, most of the ministers
who had opened their pulpits to him on his first visit now kept them
resolutely closed, and the faculties of both Yale and Harvard issued
pamphlets denouncing him, denying his charges against the colleges,
and submitting a bill of countercharges. There is no reason to accept
the view of some of Whitefield s more suspicious opponents that he
intended to "vilify and subvert" the colleges of New England in order
to overthrow its established ministers and create -wholly new ways of
training their successors. But at a time when scores of local pastors
were being denounced to their own congregations by awakeners as
lacking in true piety, if not as agents of the devil, the fear of thor
oughgoing subversion was an understandable response. 5

The burning of books and the baiting of colleges, to be sure, were
examples not of the characteristic behavior of the awakeners, but of
their excesses. The awakeners had not started out to divide the
churches, attack the colleges, or discredit intellect and learning; in so
far as they did so, it was only to serve their fundamental purpose,
which was to revive religion and bring souls to God. And, for all the
tart animadversions of men like Chauncy, the anti-intellectual effects
of the New England and Middle Colony Awakenings, taking place as
they did within the framework of the powerful Congregational and
Presbyterian respect for learning and rationality, were distinctly
limited. But the Great Awakening, even in New England, revealed the
almost uncontrollable tendency of such revivals toward extremes of
various kinds. Opponents, with Chauncy, said that the emotional fevers
and the anti-intellectualism of the Awakening were its essence, but
the friends of revival thought these things were merely the incidental
defects of a fundamentally good movement toward Christian con
version. In the short run, and in the restrained milieu of the New
England churches, the friends of the Awakening were probably right;
but their opponents divined more correctly what the inner tendency
and future direction of such revivals would be especially when
revivalism got away from the traditions and restraints of New England
into the great American interior. The most recent historian of the New

5 On the reaction of the New England colleges to the Awakening, see Richard
Hofstadter and Walter P. Metzger: The Development of Academic Freedom in the
United States (New York, 1955), pp. 159-63.

THE RELIGION OF THE HEART 74

England Awakening, who writes of it with evident sympathy, still
concludes that it "demonstrated the feasibility of and made fashion
able a fervent evangelism without intellectual discipline," and ob
serves that "the discrediting of liuman learning/ characteristic of only
a minority during the Awakening, later became typical of a majority of
Protestantism." 8

There can be little doubt that the conventional judgment is right:
by achieving a religious style congenial to the comman man and giving
him an alternative to the establishments run by and largely for the
comfortable classes, the Awakening quickened the democratic spirit
in America; by telling the people that they had a right to hear the kind
of preachers they liked and understood, even under some circum
stances a right to preach themselves, the revivalists broke the hold of
the establishments and heightened that assertiveness and self-
sufficiency which visitor after visitor from abroad was later to find
characteristic of the American people. Moreover, the impulse given to
humanitarian causes to anti-slavery and the conversion of slaves and
Indians must also be chalked up to the credit of the Great Awaken
ing. There was no soul to whose welfare the good awakener was
indifferent. But the costs ( in spite of the newly formed colleges ) to the
cause of intellect and learning in religion must also be reckoned. The
awakeners were not the first to disparage the virtues of mind, but they
quickened anti-intellectualism; and they gave to American anti-
intellectualism its first brief moment of militant success. With the
Awakenings, the Puritan age in American religion came to an end and
the evangelical age began. Subsequent revivals repeated in an ever
larger theater the merits and defects of the revivals of the eighteenth
century.

* 5 *

As later revivalism moved from New England and the Middle Colonies
and from the Congregational and Presbyterian denominations out into
the saddlebag and bear-meat country of the South and West, it be
came more primitive, more emotional, more given to "ecstatic" mani
festations. The preachers were less educated, less inclined to restrair
physical responses as an instrument of conversion; and the grovelings
jerkings, bowlings, and barkings increased. From the beginning
Whitefield s work had been effective in the Southern colonies; th<
6 Gaustad: op. cit., pp. 129, 139.

75 The Evangelical Spirit

evangelical movement, spurred by his preaching and by the overflow
of Middle-Colony Presbyterian revivalists, spread into Virginia, North
Carolina, and the deeper South in the 1740*5 and 1750*8. There
revivalists found a large unchurched population; and there, where the
rusticated Anglican clergymen sometimes went to seed, the grounds
for an indictment of the established ministry were considerably better
than they had been in the North. There also, because the Anglican
establishment was linked with the upper classes, the democratic and
dissenting implications of revivalism were sharper. In the South,
despite the activity of such a distinguished Presbyterian preacher as
Samuel Davies, later to be president of Princeton, a major part was
played by Baptists and later by Methodists, groups less committed
than the Presbyterians and Congregationalists to a learned ministry.
There only weak obstacles stood in the way of such revival phenomena
as unpaid itinerant ministers, laymen preaching to the people, and
denunciations of the established clerics.

The Southern revivalists carried the light of the gospel to a people
who were not only unchurched but often uncivilized. The Reverend
Charles Woodmason, an Anglican minister who traveled extensively in
the Carolina back-country during the 1760*8 and 1770*5 left a chilling
picture of the savagery of the life he found there and a suggestive if
rather jaundiced record of "these roving Teachers that stir up the
Minds of the People against the Established Church, and her Minis
ters and make the Situation of any Gentleman extremely uneasy,
vexatious, and disagreeable."

Few or no Books are to be found in all this vast Country, beside
the Assembly, Catechism, Watts Hymns, Bunyans Pilgrims Prog
ress Russells Whitefields and Erskines Sermons. Nor do they
delight in Historical Books or in having them read to them, as do
our Vulgar in England, for these People despise Knowledge, and
instead of honouring a Learned Person, or any one of Wit or
Knowledge, be it in the Arts, Sciences, or Languages, they despise
and 111 treat them And this Spirit prevails even among the
Principals of this Province,

Of the revivalist or New Light faction among the Baptists he re
ported a few years later that they were altogether opposed to au
thority and, having made successful assaults upon the established
church, were now trying to destroy the state. ""The Gentlemen of the
Law, seem now to engage their Attention: Like Straw and Tyler, of

THE RELIGION OF THE HEART 76

old [John Rackstraw and Wat Tyler of the English Peasants* Revolt of
1 38i] ? they want for to demolish all the Learned Professions. Human
Learning being contrary to the spirit of God." 7

What Woodmason observed on the Carolina frontier in the eight
eenth century was an example, somewhat exaggerated, of the condi
tions in which the shifting population increasingly found itself. As the
people moved westward after the Revolution, they were forever out
running the institutions of settled society; it was impossible for
institutions to move as fast or as constantly as the population. The
trans-Allegheny population, which was about 100,000 in 17^0, had
jumped to 2,250,000 thirty years later. Many families made not one but
two or three moves in a brief span of years. Organizations dissolved;
restraints disappeared. Churches, social bonds, and cultural institu
tions often broke down, and they could not be reconstituted before the
frontier families made yet another leap into the wilderness or the
prairie. Samuel J. Mills, later one of the chief organizers of the Ameri
can Bible Society, took two companions on Western trips during
181215 and found community after community which had been
settled many years but which had no schools and no churches and
little interest in establishing either. In Kaskaskia, the capital of Illinois
territory, they could not find a single complete Bible. 8

John Mason Peck, the first Baptist missionary to work in the Illinois
and Missouri region, later recalled "a specimen of the squatter race
found on the extreme frontiers" in 1818 in an extremely primitive
condition**: 9

About nine o clock I found the family to which I was directed.
As this family was a specimen of the squatter race found on the
extreme frontiers in early times, some specific description may
amuse the reader, for I do not think a duplicate can now [1864]
be found within the boundaries of Missouri. The single log-cabin,

7 Richard J. Hooker, ed. : The Carolina Backcountry on the Eve of the Revolu
tion (Chapel Hill, 1953), pp. 42,, 52-3, 113, on cultural conditions in the Southern
back-country. See also Carl Bridenbaugh: Myths and Realities: Societies of the
Colonial South (Baton Rouge, 1952), chapter 3.

8 Colin B. Goodykoontz: Home Missions on the American Frontier (Caldwell,
Idaho, 1939), pp. 13943. It was not merely Protestant denominations that suf
fered this breakdown of religious practice in the process of migration. An Indiana
priest wrote in 1849 of Irish immigrants in his vicinity: "They scarcely know there
is a God; they are ashamed to attend Catechism, and when they do come they do
not understand the instruction." Sister Mary Carol Schroeder: The Catholic Church
in the Diocese of Vincennes, 18471877 (Washington, 1946), p. 58.

9 Rufus Babcock, ed. : Forty Years of Pioneer Life: Memoir of John Mason
Peck, D.D. (Philadelphia, 1864), pp. 101-3.

77 The Evangelical Spirit

of the most primitive structure, was situated at some distance
within the cornfield. In and around it were the patriarchal head
and his wife, two married daughters and their husbands, with
three or four little children, and a son and daughter grown up to
manhood and womanhood. The old man said he could read but
"mighty poorly ." The old woman wanted a hyme book, but could
not read one. The rest of this romantic household had no use for
books or "any such trash." I had introduced myself as a Baptist
preacher, traveling through the country preaching the gospel to
the people. The old man and his wife were Baptists,, at least had
been members of some Baptist church when they lived "in the
settlements/ The "settlements" with this class in those days meant
the back parts of Virginia and the Carolinas, and in some instances
the older sections of Kentucky and Tennessee, where they had
lived in their earlier days. But it was "a mighty poor chance" for
Baptist preaching where they lived. The old man could tell me
of a Baptist meeting he had been at on the St. Frangois, and
could direct me to Elder Farrar s residence near St. Michael. The
old woman and the young folks had not seen a Baptist preacher
since they had lived in the territory some eight or ten years. Oc
casionally they had been to a Methodist meeting. This was the
condition of a numerous class of people then scattered over the
frontier settlements of Missouri. The "traveling missionary" was
received with all the hospitality title old people had the ability or
knew how to exercise. The younger class were shy and kept out of
the cabin, and could not be persuaded to come in to hear the mis
sionary read the Scriptures and offer a prayer. There was evidence
of backwardness, or some other propensity, attending all the
domestic arrangements. . . .

Not a table, chair, or any article of furniture could be seen.
These deficiencies were common on the frontiers; for emigrations
from the "settlements" were often made on pack-horses, and no
domestic conveniences could be transported, except the most in
dispensable cooking-utensils, bedding, and a change or two of
clothing. But the head of the family must be shiftless indeed, and
void of all backwoods skill and enterprise, who could not make a
table for family use. There were two fashions of this necessary arti
cle in the time to which I refer. One was a slab, or "puncheon," as
then called, split from a large log, four feet long, and from fifteen
to eighteen inches wide, and hewn down to the thickness of a

THE RELIGION OF THE HEART 78

plank. In this were inserted four legs, after the fashion of a stool
or bench, at the proper height. The other was a rough frame, in
which posts were inserted for legs, and covered with split clap
boards shaved smooth, and fastened with small wooden pins. We
found one of these descriptions of tables in hundreds of log cabins
where neatness, tidiness, and industry prevailed. . . .

The viands now only need description to complete this accurate
picture of real squatter life. The rancid bacon when boiled could
have been detected by a foetid atmosphere across the yard, had
there been one. The snap-beans, as an accompaniment, were not
half-boiled. The sour buttermilk taken from the churn, where the
milk was kept throughout the whole season, as it came from the
cow, was "no go/* The article on which the traveler made a hearty
breakfast, past ten o clock in the morning, was the corn, boiled in
fair water.

At times, the missionaries were simply overwhelmed. One wrote of
his difficulties in the town of China, Indiana, in 1833: *

Ignorance & her squalid brood. A universal dearth of intellect.
Total abstinence from literature is very generally practiced. Aside
from br. Wilder and myself, there is not a literary man of any
sort in the bounds. There is not a scholar in grammar or geography,
or a teacher capable of instructing in them, to my knowledge.
There are some neighborhoods in which there has never been a
school of any kind. Parents and children are one dead level of
ignorance. Others are supplied a f ew months in the year with the
most antiquated & unreasonable forms of teaching reading, writing
& cyphering. Master Ignoramus is a striking facsimile of them.
They are never guilty of teaching any thing but "pure school
master larnin" Of course there is no kind of ambition for improve
ment; & it is no more disgrace for man, woman or child to be un
able to read, than to have a long nose. Our own church the other
day elected a man to the eldership who is unable to read the bible.
I don t know of ten families who take any kind of paper, political
or religious, & the whole of their revenue to the Post office de
partment is not as much as mine alone. Need I stop to remind you
of the host of loathsome reptiles such a stagnant pool is fitted to
breedl Croaking jealousy; bloated Bigotry; coiling suspicion;
wormish blindness; crocodile malicel . . .
1 Goodykcontz: op. cit., p. 19 x.

79 The Evangelical Spirit

But men and women living under conditions of poverty and exacting
toil, facing the hazards of Indian raids, fevers, and agues, and raised
on whisky and brawling, could not afford education and culture; and
they found it easier to reject what they could not have than to admit
the lack of it as a deficiency in themselves.

Another worker in a nearby Indiana town wrote more sympatheti
cally at about the same time that "the people are poor & far from market
labouriously engaged in improving & cultivating their new land." But
the cultural conditions he found were somewhat the same: 2

Society here is in an unformed state composed of persons from
every part of the Union. . . . Religious sects are numerous &
blind guides enough to swallow all the camels in Arabia Some of
these cant read Some labour to preach down the Sabbath! &
others to rob Christ of His divinity! and all harmoniously unite in
decrying education as requisite for a public teacher & in abusing
the learned clergy who take wages for their services. When shall
this reign of ignorance & error cease in the West?

Of course, to describe the condition of this country is to provide the
evangelists with their best defense. It must be said that they were not
lowering the level of a high culture but *8rying to bring the ordinary
restraints and institutions of a civilized society into an area which had
hardly any culture at all. The best of them were clearly the intellectual
and cultural superiors of their environment, and the poorest of them
could hardly have made it worse. The home missionaries sent out by
the religious organizations were constantly fighting against one mani
festation or another of the process of social dissolution against the
increasing numbers of unchurched and non-religious people, against
"marriages" unsanctified in the church, and against unregulated lives,
wild drinking, and savage fighting. Though often welcomed, they still
had to carry on their work under opposition that at the least came to
heckling and at the worst was really hazardous. The most famous of the
circuit-riding Methodist preachers, Peter Cartwright, reported that
camp meetings were attended by rowdies armed with knives, clubs,
and horsewhips, determined to break up the proceedings. One Sunday
morning, when his sermon was interrupted by toughs, Cartwright him
self had to lead his congregation in a counterassault. Those who under
took the hard task of bringing religion westward, as it were, in their

2 Ibid., pp. 191-2. For an account o similar conditions in early Indiana, see
Baynard R. Hall: The New Purchase ( 1843; ed. Princeton, 1916 ) , p. 120.

8i

CHAPTER IV

Evangelicalism
and the Revivalists

JLx SEEMS evident in retrospect, as indeed it did to some contem
poraries, that the conditions of early nineteenth-century American de
velopment created a nev* and distinctive form of Christianity in which
both the organization of the churches and the standards of the ministry
were unique. For eenturies the first tradition of Christianity had been
not the tradition of multiple religious "denominations" but the tradi
tion of the Church. But from the beginning the American colonies were
settled by a variety of immigrant groups representing the wide range
of confessional commitments that had grown up in post-Reformation
Europe the religions of the "left" as well as those of the "right." It be
came clear at an early date that the maintenance on these shores of a
monopolistic and coercive establishment would be extremely difficult;
and by the middle of the eighteenth century the colonials were well on
the way to learning the amenities of religious accommodation and the
peaceful possibilities of a legal policy of toleration.

As religious disunity -was followed by religious multiplicity, Ameri
cans uprooted church establishments and embraced religious liberty.
Under the broad liberty prevailing in the American states at the
close of the eighteenth century and the beginning of the nineteenth,
religious groups that had begun as dissenting sects developed into firm
organizations, less formal than the churches of the past, but too secure
and well-organized to be considered sects. The promoted sects and
the demoted establishments, now operating more or less on a par in a

THE RELIGION OF THE HEART 80

saddlebags, would have been ineffective had they been the sort of
pastors who were appropriate to the settled churches of the East. They
would have been ineffective in converting their moving flocks if they
had not been able to develop a vernacular style in preaching, and if
they had failed to share or to simulate in some degree the sensibilities
and prejudices of their audiences anti-authority, anti-aristocracy, anti-
Eastern, anti-learning. The various denominations responded in dif
ferent ways to this necessity: but in general it might be said that the
congregations were raised and the preachers -were lowered. In brief,
the elite upon which culture depended for its transmission was being
debased by the demands of a rude social order. If our purpose were to
pass judgment on the evangelical ministers, a good case could be made
for them on the counts of sincerity, courage, self -sacrifice, and intelli
gence. \But since our primary purpose is to assess the transit of civili
zation and the development of culture, we must bear in mind the so
ciety that was emerging. It was a society of courage and character, of
endurance and practical cunning, but it was not a society likely to
produce poets or artists or savants.

CHAPTER IV

Evangelicalism
and the Revivalists

JL.T SEEMS evident in retrospect, as indeed it did to some contem
poraries, that the conditions of early nineteenth-century American de
velopment created a nev, and distinctive form of Christianity in which
both the organization of the churches and the standards of the ministry
were unique. F^ centuries the first tradition of Christianity had been
not the tradition of multiple religious "denominations" but the tradi
tion of the ihurch. But from the beginning the American colonies were
settled by a variety of immigrant groups representing the wide range
of confessional commitments that had grown up in post-Reformation
Europe the religions of the "left" as well as those of the "right." It be
came clear at an early date that the maintenance on these shores of a
monopolistic and coercive establishment would be extremely difficult;
and by the middle of the eighteenth century the colonials were well on
the way to learning the amenities of religious accommodation and the
peaceful possibilities of a legal policy of toleration.

As religious disunity was followed by religious multiplicity, Ameri
cans uprooted church establishments and embraced religious liberty.
Under the broad liberty prevailing in the American states at the
close of the eighteenth century and the beginning of the nineteenth,
religious groups that had begun as dissenting sects developed into firm
organizations, less formal than the churches of the past, but too secure
and well-organized to be considered sects. The promoted sects and
the demoted establishments, now operating more or less on a par in a

THE RELIGION" OF THE HEART 8

voluntary and freely competitive religious environment, settled down
into what has come to be called denominationalism. 1 The essence of
American denominationalism is that churches became voluntary or
ganizations. The layman, living in a society in which no church enjoyed
the luxury of compulsory membership and in which even traditional,
inherited membership was often extraordinarily weak, felt free to
make a choice as to which among several denominations should have
his allegiance. In the older church pattern, the layman was born into a
church, was often forced by the state to stay in it, and received his
religious experiences in the fashion determined by its liturgical forms.
The American layman, however, was not simply born into a denomi
nation nor did he inherit certain sacramental forms; the denomination
was a voluntary society which he chose to join often after undergoing a
transforming religious experience.

There was nothing fictional about this choice. So fluid had been the
conditions of American life toward the end of the eighteenth century,
and so disorganizing the consequences of the Revolution, that perhaps
as many as ninety per cent of the Americans were unchurched in 1790.
In the subsequent decades this astonishing condition of religious
anarchy was to a considerable degree remedied. The religious public
sorted itself out, as it were, and much of it fell into line in one denomi
nation or another. But in this process the decision to join a church had
been made over and over again by countless individuals. And -what the
layman chose was a religious denomination already molded by previous
choices and infused with the American s yearning for a break with the
past, his passion for the future, his growing disdain for history. In the
American political creed the notion prevailed that Europe represented
corruptions of the past which must be surmounted. The Protestant
denominations were based on a similar view of the Christian past. 2 It
was commonly believed that the historical development of Christianity
was not an accretion of valuable institutional forms and practices but a
process of corruption and degeneration in which the purity of primitive

1 Readers who are familiar with Sidney E. Mead s brilliant essays on American
religious history will recognize my great indebtedness to him in the following
pages, especially to his penetrating account of "Denominationalism: The Shape
of Protestantism in America/ Church History, Vol. XXIII (December, 1954),
pp. 29 1320; and "The Rise of the Evangelical Conception of the Ministry in
Ajnerica ( 16071850 )/* in Richard Niebuhr and Daniel D. Williams, ed.: The
Ministry in Historical Perspectives ( New York, 1956 ), pp. 207 49.

2 For a stimulating exploration of the desire to surmount the past in nineteenth-
century American letters, see R. W. B. Lewis: The American Adam (Chicago,
1965).

83 Evangelicalism and the Revivalists

Christianity had been lost. The goal of the devout, then, was not to
preserve forms but to strike out anew in order to recapture this purity.
"This is an age of freedom," wrote the distinguished evangelical
Presbyterian, Albert Barnes, in 1844, "and men will be free. The reli
gion of forms is the stereotyped wisdom or folly of the past, and does
not adapt itself to the free movements, the enlarged views, the varying
plans of this age." 3

The objective was to return to the pure conditions of primitive
Christianity, to which Scripture alone would give the key. Even those
who disliked this tendency in American religion could see how cen
tral it was. In 1849 a spokesman of the German Reformed Church
remarked that the appeal of the sects to private judgment and to the
Bible 4

involves, of necessity, a protest against the authority of all previ
ous history, except so far as it may seem to agree -with what is thus
found to be true; in which case, of course, the only real measure
of truth is taken to be, not this authority of history at all, but the
mind, simply, of the particular sect itself. ... A genuine sect will
not suffer itself to be embarrassed for a moment, either at its start
or afterwards, by the consideration that it has no proper root in
past history. Its ambition is rather to appear in this respect au toch-
thonic, aboriginal, self-sprung from the Bible, or through the
Bible from the skies. . . . The idea of a historical continuity in
the life of the Church, carries with it no weight whatever for the
sect consciousness.

It is significant, then, that the bond that held most denominations
together need not be a traditional, inherited confessional bond that is,
not a historical system of doctrinal belief but goals or motives more or
less newly constituted and freshly conceived. Since there need be only
a shadow of confessional unity in the denominations, the rational dis
cussion of theological -issues in the past a great source of intellectual
discipline in the churches came to be regarded as a distraction, as a
divisive force. Therefore, although it was not abandoned, it was sub
ordinated to practical objectives which were conceived to be far more

3 "The Position of the Evangelical Party in the Episcopal Church," Miscel
laneous Essays and Reviews (New York, 1855), Vol. I, p. 371. This essay is a
thoroughgoing attack on religious forms as being inconsistent with the evangelical
spirit.

4 John W. Nevin: "The Sect System," Mercersburg Review, Vol. I (September,
1849), pp. 499~5oo.

THE RELIGION OF THE HEART 84

important. 5 The peculiar views or practices of any denomination, if
they were not considered good for the general welfare or the common
mission enterprise, were sacrificed to this mission without excessive
regret. 6 And the mission itself was defined by evangelism. In a society
so mobile and fluid, with so many unchurched persons to be gained for
the faith, the basic purpose of the denominations, to which all other
purposes and commitments were subordinated, was that of gaining
converts.

The denominations were trying to win to church allegiance a public
which, for whatever reason, had not been held by the traditional
sanctions of religion and which had lost touch both with liturgical forms
and with elaborate creeds. It was unlikely that an appeal mediated by
such forms and creeds could now regain the people. What did seem to
work was a restoration of the kind of primitive emotional appeal that
the first Christian proselytizers had presumably used in the early days
of the faith. Revivalism succeeded where traditionalism had failed.
Emotional upheavals took the place of the coercive sanctions of reli
gious establishments. Simple people were brought back to faith with
simple ideas, voiced by forceful preachers who were capable of getting
away from the complexities and pressing upon them the simplest of
alternatives: the choice of heaven or hell. Salvation, too, was taken as a
matter of choice: the sinner was expected to "get religion" it was not
thought that religion would get him. Whatever device worked to

5 This historical background may go far to explain what Will Herberg has
founcTto be such a prominent characteristic of contemporary American religion
a strong belief in the importance of religion-in-general coupled -with great in
difference to the content of religion. (Cf. Eisenhower in 195^: "Our government
makes no sense, unless it is founded in a deeply felt religious faith and I don t
care what it is." ) ] This generalized faith in faith is the product, among other
things, of centuries of denominational accommodation. See Herberg: Protestant,
Catholic, Jew (Anchor ed., New York, 1960), chapter 5, especially pp. 8490.

6 Even in 1782 Cr&vecoeur found that in America, "if the sectaries are not
settled close together, if they are mixed with other denominations, their zeal
will cool for want of fuel, and will be extinguished in a little time. Then the
Americans will become as to religion what they are as to country, allied to all. . . .
All sects are mixed as well as all nations; thus religious indifference is imper
ceptibly disseminated from one end of the continent to the other; which is at
present one of the strongest characteristics of the Americans. Where this will
reach no one can tell, perhaps it may leave a vacuum fit to receive other systems.
Persecution, religious pride, the love of contradiction, are the food of what the
world commonly calls religion. These motives have ceased here; zeal in Europe is
confined; here it evaporates in the great distance it has to travel; there it is a
grain of powder enclosed, here it burns away in the open air, and consumes with
out effect." Letters from, an American Farmer (New York, 1957), pp. 44, 47. Of
course, in the decades after 1790 some of the religious enthusiasm was restored,
but the passion for distinguishing sectarian differences was restored in -nothing
like the same manner.

85 Evangelicalism and the Revitialists

bring him back into the fold was good. As that indefatigable saver of
souls, D wight L. Moody, once put it: "It makes no difference how
you get a man to God, provided you get him there." 7 Long before
pragmatism became a philosophical creed, it was formulated, albeit in
a crude way, by the evangelists. For the layman the pragmatic test in
religion was the experience of conversion; for the clergyman, it was the
ability to induce this experience. [The minister s success in winning
souls was taken as the decisive evidence that he preached the truth. 8
The ministry itself was metamorphosed by the denominational sys
tem and the regnant evangelical spirit. The churches, whatever their
denominational form or plan of organization, tended in varying de
grees to move in the direction of a kind of Congregationalism or local
ism. The combined forces of localism and revivalism greatly strength
ened the hand of the heretic or the schismatic: so long as he could
produce results, who could control him? They also strengthened the
hand of the layman. The minister, pulled away from the sustaining
power of a formidable central church, was largely thrown on his own
resources in working out his relationship with his congregation. He did
claim and establish as much authority as he could, but the conditions
of American life favored an extraordinary degree of lay control. In the
South even the colonial Anglican church, with its traditions of cleracal
authority, had found that an extraordinary measure of control passed
into the hands of its vestrymen. Everywhere the American ministers
seemed to be judged by the laymen, and in a sense used by them.
Even in the eighteenth century, Crevecoeur had commented on the
attitude of the Low Dutchman who "conceives no other idea of a
clergyman than that of an hired man; if he does his work well he will
pay him the stipulated sum; if not he will dismiss him, and do without
his sermons, and let his house be shut up for years/ 9

7 Quoted in William G. McLoughlin: Billy Sunday Was His Real Name (Chi
cago, 1955), p. 158. A more sophisticated preacher like Washington Gladden could
also say that his own theology "had to be hammered out on the anvil for daily
use in the pulpit. The pragmatic test was the only one that could be applied to it:
Will it work?* " Recollections (Boston, 1909), p. 163.

8 One of the chapters in Charles G. Finney s Lectures on Revivals of Religion
(New York, 1835) is headed: "A Wise Minister Will Be Successful," and cites
Proverbs XI, 30: "He that winneth souls is wise."

9 Crevecoeur: op. cit., p. 45. This should not be taken as suggesting that the
ministers were not respected. They did not have respect by virtue of their office,
but they could and often did win respect. Timothy Dwight said of the early
Connecticut clergy that they had no official power but much influence, ""Clergy
men, here, are respected for what they are, and for what they do, and not for
anything adventitious to themselves, or their office/* Mead: "The Rise of the
Evangelical Conception of the Ministry," p. 236.

THE RELIGION, &w THE HEART 86

The ministers, in turn, unable to rely as much as in the Old World
upon the authority o their churches and their own positions, became,
when they were most successful, gifted politicians in church affairs,
well versed in the secular arts of manipulation. Moreover, there was a
premium upon ministers capable of a mixed kind of religious and na
tionalistic statecraft, whose object was to reform the country and -win
the West for Christianity. Concerning the apparatus of societies de
voted to such purposes which sprang up between 1800 and 1850, one
minister complained: "The minister is often expected to be, for the
most part, a manager of social utilities, a wire-puller of beneficent
agencies," whose character was too often judged by "the amount of
visible grinding that it can accomplish in the mill of social reform.
. . /* x As a consequence, Sidney E. Mead has pointed out y "the concep
tion of the minister practically lost its priestly dimension as traditionally
conceived, and became that of a consecrated functionary, called of
God, who directed the purposive activities of the visible church/ 2

Finally, the work of the minister tended to be judged by his success
in a single area the saving of souls in measurable numbers. The local
minister was judged either by his charismatic powers or by his ability
to prepare his congregation for the preaching of some itinerant minis
terial charmer who would really awaken its members. 3 The "star" sys
tem prevailed in religion before it reached the theater. As the evangeli
cal impulse became more widespread and more dominant, the
selection and training of ministers was increasingly shaped by the re
vivalist criterion of ministerial merit. The Puritan ideal of the minister
as an intellectual and educational leader was steadily weakened in the
face of the evangelical ideal of the minister as a popular crusader and
exhorter. Theological education itself became more instrumental. Sim
ple dogmatic formulations were considered sufficient.^ In considerable

1 Andrew P. Peabody: The Work of the Ministry (Boston, 1850), p. 7. It was
the patriotic and statesmanlike concern of the Protestant clergy for the Christiani-
zation of the West that caused Tocqueville to remark that "if you converse with
these missionaries of Christian civilization, you will be surprised to hear them
speak so often of the goods of this world, and to meet a politician where you
expected to find a priest." Democracy in America, ed. by Phillips Bradley (New
York, 1945), Vol. I, pp. 306-7.

2 "The Rise of the Evangelical Conception of the Ministry," p. 2,2,8.

3 This reliance upon the charismatic power of the minister has never ceased to
be important. "Truth through Personality," said Phillips Brooks, "is our description
of real preaching." And one of his contemporaries, William Jewett Tucker, agreed:
"The law is, the greater the personality of the preacher, the larger the use of his
personality, the wider and deeper the response of men to truth." See Robert S.
Michaelsen: "The Protestant Ministry in America: 1850 to the Present," in Niebuhr
and Williams: op. cit., p. 283.

87 Evangelicalism and the Revivalists

measure the churches withdrew from intellectual encounters with the
secular world, gave up the idea that religion is a part of the whole life
of intellectual experience, and often abandoned the field of rational
studies on the assumption that they were the natural province of
science alone. By 1853 an outstanding clergyman complained that
there was "an impression, somewhat general, that an intellectual
clergyman is deficient m piety, and that an eminently pious minister is
deficient in intellect." 4 /

All the foregoing is in the nature of broad generalization, always some
what hazardous where American religion is concerned, because of
regional differences and the diversity of American religious practices.
But I think these generalizations roughly describe the prevalent pat
tern of American denominational religion, and the characteristic ef
fects of evangelicalism. There were, of course, important conservative
churches largely or wholly uninfluenced by the evangelicals. Some of
them, like the Roman Catholic Church and the Lutherans, were unaf
fected except in external ways by the currents of evangelicalism;
others, like the Episcopalian, were affected in varying degrees from
place to place; others, like the Presbyterian and Congregational, were
internally divided by the evangelical movement.

If one compares American society at the close of the Revolution, still
largely hemmed in east of the Alleghenies, with the much vaster Ameri
can society of 1850, when the denominational pattern was basically
fixed, one is impressed by the gains of the groups committed to evan
gelicalism. At the end of the Revolution the three largest and strongest
denominations were the Anglicans, the Presbyterians, the Congrega-
tionalists. Two of these had once been established in one place or an
other, and the third had a strong heritage in America. By 1850, the
change was striking. The largest single denomination was then the
Roman Catholic. Among Protestant groups the first two were now the
Methodists and the Baptists, once only dissenting sects. They were fol
lowed by the Presbyterians, Congregationalists, and Lutherans, in that

4 Bela Bates Edwards: "Influence of Eminent Piety on the Intellectual Powers/
Writings (Boston, 1853), Vol. II, pp. 497-8. "Are we not apt to dissociate the
intellect from the heart, to array knowledge and piety against each other, to exalt
the feelings at the expense of the judgment, and to create the impression^ exten
sively, that eminent attainments in knowledge and grace are incompatible? * Ibid.,
pp. 472-3-

THE RELIGION OF THE HEART 88

order. The Episcopal Church had fallen to eighth place a significant
token of its inability, as an upper-class conservative church, to hold its
own in the American environment. 5

By and large, then, the effort to maintain and extend Protestant
Christianity, both in the fresh country of the West and in the growing
cities, was carried on successfully by the popular, evangelical denomi
nations, not by the liturgical churches. The sweeping gains of the
Methodists and Baptists were evidence of their ability to adapt to the
conditions of American life. The extent to which the evangelicals had
taken over such denominations as the Congregationalists and the Pres
byterians is also evidence of the power of the evangelical impulse to
transform older religious structures.

The evangelists were the main agents of the spread of Protestant
Christianity, religious revival its climactic technique. From the closing
years of the eighteenth century, and well on into the nineteenth, suc
cessive waves of revivals swept over one or another part of the country.
A first wave, running roughly from about 1795 to 1835, was particularly
powerful in the New West of Tennessee and Kentucky, then in west
ern New York and the Middle Western states. Its fevers had not
long died out when a new wave, beginning about 1840, swept into the
towns and cities, demonstrating (as later revivalists like D wight L.
Moody, Billy Sunday, and Billy Graham were to understand) that
revivalism need not be only a country phenomenon. This revival
reached its climax in the troubled years 1857 and 1858, when great out
pourings of the spirit affected New York, Boston, Philadelphia, Cin
cinnati, Pittsburgh, Rochester, Binghamton, Fall River, and a host of
smaller towns. 6

Revivals were not the sole instruments of this effort. By the third

5 For an excellent statement about the numbers, schismatic divisions, theological
commitments, and mutual relations of the various denominations, see Timothy L.
Smith: Revivalism and Social Reform (New York and Nashville, 1958), chapter i,
"The Inner Structure of American Protestantism." In 1855 all Methodist groups
(including North and South) had 1.5 million members; all Baptists groups 1.1
million; all Presbyterian groups 490,000; all Lutheran, German Reformed and
similar groups, 350,000. The Congregationalists numbered about 200,000; the
Episcopalians, only about 100,000.

6 My treatment of revivalism owes much to William G. McLoughlin s excellent
survey of the whole movement: Modern Revivalism (New York, 1959); to Timothy
L. Smith s Revivalism and Social Reform, already cited, which is particularly good
on the period after 1840 and on the urban revivals; to Charles A. Johnson s account
of The Frontier Camp Meeting (Dallas, 1955), which is especially illuminating
with regard to the primitive frontier conditions of 1800 i 820 ; and to Bernard
Weisberger s They Gathered at the River (Boston, 1958).

89 Evangelicalism and the Revivalists

decade of the century, the evangelicals had founded a number of mis
sion societies, Bible and tract societies, education societies, Sunday-
school unions, and temperance organizations, most of them organized
on interdenominational lines. These agencies were prepared to assist in
a crusade whose first objective would be to Christianize the Mississippi
Valley and save it from religious apathy, infidelity, or Romanism, and
whose ultimate purpose was to convert every American and then,
quite literally, the world. For a long time denominational differences
were subordinated in this drive against the common foes of skepticism,
passivity, and Romanism. Where denominations did not co-operate
as such, the benevolent societies gave scope to individuals who were
interested in a common effort; they also oflEered opportunities for as
sertive laymen to take the lead in joint benevolent enterprises where
clergymen were reluctant. The evangelical groups maintained their
co-operation through most of the great revival upsurge of 1795 to
1835. But by about 1837 *& e common effort had lost its impetus; in part
it was checked by resurgent disputes between the sects and by schisms
within them; but it declined also because the evangelizing crusade had
already succeeded in achieving its main objectives. 7

Successful it was, by any reasonable criteria. The figures show a
remarkable campaign of conversion carried out under inordinately dif
ficult circumstances. In the mid-eighteenth century, America had a
smaller proportion of church members than any other nation in Chris
tendom. American religious statistics are notoriously unreliable, but it
has been estimated that in 1800 about one of every fifteen Americans
was a church member; by 1850 it was one of seven. In 1855 slightly
more than four million persons were church members in a population
of over twenty-seven million. To the twentieth-century American, ac
customed to see a great majority of the population enrolled as church
members, these figures may not seem impressive; but it is important to
remember that church membership, now bland and often meaningless,
was then a more serious and demanding thing; all the evangelizing
sects required a personal experience of conversion as well as a fairly
stern religious discipline. There were many more church-goers than
church members at least if we are to judge by the twenty-six mil
lion church seating accommodations reported in 1860 for a population

r On the common effort of this period, and its recession, see Charles I. Foster:
An Errand of Mercy: The Evangelical United Front, 179O-1&37 (Chapel Hill,
1960).

THE RELIGION OF THE HEART go

of thirty-one million. 8 The most imposing achievements o all the
denominations were those of the Methodists and Baptists, who together
had almost seventy per cent of all Protestant communicants.

* 3 *

As the evangelical tide at first swept westward, and then into the
growing cities, it became clear that the religious conquest of America
was mainly in the hands of three denominations: the Methodists, the
Baptists, and the Presbyterians. A look at these denominations will tell
us much about the cultural evangelization of the continent.

Among the evangelical groups, the strongest intellectual tendencies
were shown by the Presbyterians, who carried westward the traditions
of both New England Congregationalism and colonial Presbyterianism.
Under the terms of their Plan of Union of 1801, the Presbyterians and
the Congregationalists had co-ordinated their activities in such a way
that Congregationalism largely lost its identity outside New England.
The Plan of Union was based upon the common Calvinist-derived
theology of the two churches; and since most Congregationalists out
side of Massachusetts had no profound objection to the Presbyterian
form of church organization, Congregational associations in New York
and the Middle West tended to be absorbed into Presbyteries. But
Congregationalism contributed a distinct cultural leaven and a strong
New England flavor to the Presbyterian Church in the Middle West.

The Presbyterians were often fiercely doctrinaire. Appealing to the
enterprising and business classes as they did, they also became the
elite church among the untraditional denominations. 9 The Presby
terians were much concerned with fostering an instrumental form of
higher education and using it for their sectarian interests. In time
they fell victim to their own doctrinal passions and underwent a
schism. Much influenced by their Congregational allies and recruits,
a portion of the Presbyterian ministry began to preach what was

8 The estimate for 1800 is that of Winfred E. Garrison: "Characteristics of
American Organized Religion/* Annals of the American Academy of Political and
Social Science, Vol. CCLVI (March, 1948), p. 20. The figures for 1855 and 1860
are in Timothy L. Smith: op. cit., pp. 17, 20-1. The proportion of the population
having church membership rose roughly from about 15 per cent in 1855 to 36 per
cent in 1900, 46 per cent in 1926, and 63 per cent in 1958. Will Herberg: Protes
tant, Catholic, Jew, pp. 47-8.

9 There is a bit of Protestant folklore which sheds light on the social position of
the various churches. A Methodist, it was said, is a Baptist who wears shoes; a
Presbyterian is a Methodist who has gone to college; and an Episcopalian is a
Presbyterian who lives off his investments.

gi Evangelicalism and the Revivalists

known as the New Haven theology, a considerably liberalized version
of Calvinism, which offered a greater hope of divine grace to a larger
portion of mankind and lent itself more readily to the spirit and prac
tice of evangelical revivals. The stricter Calvinists of the Old School,
more in the Scottish and Scotch-Irish tradition, and based on Princeton
College and Princeton Theological Seminary, could not accept the
New School ideas. From 1828 to 1837 the church was shaken by con
troversies and heresy trials. Leaders of Presbyterian evangelism such
as Albert Barnes, Lyman Beecher, Asa Mahan, and Lyman Beecher s
son Edward were among those charged with heresy. Finally, in 1837,
the Old School ousted the New School, and henceforth synods and
presbyteries throughout the country had to line up with one or the
other of the two factions. Aside from theological differences, the Old
School found the New School altogether too sympathetic to inter
denominational missionary societies, and in a lesser measure objected
to abolitionist sympathizers and agitators, who were strong in New
School ranks. Yale, Oberlin College, and Lane Theological Seminary
in Cincinnati were the main intellectual centers of New School evan
gelism. Its great figure was Charles Grandison Finney, the outstand
ing revivalist in America between the days of Edwards and Whitefield
and those of Dwight L. Moody.

The case of Charles Grandison Finney provides a good illustration
of the ambiguities of -what has been called "PresbygationaF evangelism
and of the difficulty involved in any facile classification of religious
anti-intellectuals. Finney and his associates, being heirs to the intel
lectual tradition of New England, were often very much concerned
with the continuation, if not the development, of learning. The heritage
of such excellent transplanted Yankee colleges as Oberlin and Carleton
College is a testimony to the persistent vitality of their tradition. It
would be difficult to find among other evangelical groups many such
literate and intelligent men as Finney, Asa Mahan, or Lyman Beecher;
and one may well wonder how many evangelists of the period since
the Civil War could have written an autobiography comparable to
Finney s Memoirs. The minds of these men had been toughened by
constant gnawing on Calvinist and neo-Calvinist theology and dis
ciplined by the necessity of carving out their own theological fretwork.
But their culture was exceptionally narrow; their view of learning was
extremely instrumental; and instead of enlarging their intellectual in
heritance, they steadily contracted it.

Finney himself, although now remembered only by those who have a

THE RELIGION OF THE HEART 92

keen interest in American religious or social history, must be reckoned
among our great men. The offspring of a Connecticut family which was
caught up in the westward movement, he spent his childhood first in
Oneida County in central New York and later near the shore of Lake
Ontario. After a brief turn at schoolteaching in New Jersey, he quali
fied for the bar in a small town not far from Utica. His conversion hap
pened when he was twenty-nine. As he tells it, he was praying for
spiritual guidance in a darkened law office when he "received a
mighty baptism of the Holy Ghost/ the first of several such mystical
confrontations that he was to have during his life. The f ollowing morn
ing he told a client: "I have a retainer from the Lord Jesus Christ to
plead his cause, and I cannot plead yours." * From that time forward,
he belonged entirely to the ministry. In 1824 he -was ordained in the
Presbyterian church, and from 1825 to 1835 he launched a series of re
vivals that made him pre-eminent among the evangelical preachers of
his time and established him as one of the most compelling figures in
the history of American religion.

Finney was gifted with a big voice and a flair for pulpit drama. But
his greatest physical asset was his intense, fixating, electrifying, madly
prophetic eyes, the most impressive eyes except perhaps for John C.
Calhoun s in the portrait gallery of nineteenth-century America. The
effect upon congregations of his sermons alternately rational and emo
tional, denunciatory and tender was overpowering. "The Lord let
me loose upon them in a wonderful manner/ he wrote of one of his
most successful early revivals, and "the congregation began to fall from
their seats in every direction, and cried for mercy. . . . Nearly the
whole congregation were either on their knees or prostrate." 2

In his theology Finney was a self-made man, an individualistic vil
lage philosopher of the sort whose independence impressed Tocque-
ville with the capacity of the American to strike out in pursuit of un
tested ideas. As a candidate for the Presbyterian ministry he politely
rejected the offer of a group of interested ministers to send him to
Princeton to study theology: "I plainly told them that I would not put
myself under such an influence as they had been under; that I was con
fident they had been wrongly educated, and they were not ministers
that met my ideal of what a minister of Christ should be." An admitted

1 Memoirs (New York, 1876), pp. 20, 24; there is an illuminating account of
Finney and enthusiasm in western New York in Whitney R. Cross: The Burned-
Over District ( Ithaca, 1950 ) .

2 Memoirs, pp. 100, 103.

93 Evangelicalism and the Revivalists

novice in theology, he still refused to accept instruction or correction
when it did not correspond with his own views. "I had read nothing on
the subject except my Bible; and what I had there found upon the
subject, I had interpreted as I would have understood the same or like
passages in a law book/ Again; "I found myself utterly unable to ac
cept doctrine on the ground of authority. ... I had no where to go
but directly to the Bible, and to the philosophy or workings of my own
mind. . . ." 3

Finney carried from the law into the pulpit an element of the old
Puritan regard for rationality and persuasion (he once said he spoke to
congregations as he would to a jury), which he used especially when he
confronted educated middle-class congregations. For all his emotional
power, he was soon regarded as too rational by some of his evangelical
associates, who warned him in 1830 that his friends were asking about
him: "Is there not danger of his turning into an intellectualist?" 4 But
Finney was proud of his ability to adapt his preaching style to the
sensibilities of his public, stressing emotion in the little country villages
and adding a note of rational persuasion in more sophisticated Western
towns such as Rochester. "Under my preaching, judges, and lawyers,
and educated men were converted by scores/ 5

At any rate, there was no danger of Finney s turning into an "in-
tellectualist." In the main, he was true to the revival tradition both in
his preaching methods and in his conception of the ministry. He did
not admire ignorance in preachers, but he admired soul-winning re-
suits, no matter how achieved; he scorned the written sermon, because
it lacked spontaneity; and he looked upon secular culture as a potential
threat to salvation.

Finney had little use for ministerial education or for the kind of
preaching he believed the educated clergy were doing. Not having en
joyed, as he said, "the advantages of the higher schools of learning," he
was acutely conscious of being regarded as an amateur by the ministry,
and he was aware of being considered undignified. Early in his career,
he learned that it was widely believed "that if I were to succeed in
the ministry, it would bring the schools into disrepute," After some

3 Ibid., pp. 42, 45-6, 54. This independence persisted, although Finney was
aware that he lacked the learning to interpret the Bible independently. In time he
learned some Latin, Greek, and Hebrew, but he "never possessed so much knowl
edge o the ancient languages as to think myself capable of independently
criticising our English translation of the Bible/ Ibid., p. 5.

4 McLoughlin: Modern Revivalism, p. 55.

5 Memoirs, p. 84; cf . pp. 365-9.

THE RELIGION OF THE HEART 94

experience in preaching, he became convinced that "the schools are to
a great extent spoiling the ministers," who were being given a great
deal o Biblical learning and theology but who did not know how to
use it. Practice was all: "A man can never learn to preach except by
preaching.~ The sermons of the school-trained ministers "degenerate
into literary essays. . . . This reading of elegant literary essays is not
preaching. It is gratifying to literary taste, but not spiritually edify
ing"*

Finney was against all forms of elegance, literary or otherwise.
Ornamentation in dress or efforts to improve one s domestic furnishings
or taste or style of life were the same to him as the depraved tastes
and refinements of smoking, drinking, card-playing, and theater-going.
As to literature: "I cannot believe that a person who has ever known the
love of God can relish a secular novel/ "Let me visit your chamber,
your parlor, or wherever you keep your books," he threatened. "What
is here? Byron, Scott, Shakespeare, and a host of triflers and blas
phemers of God." Even the classical languages, so commonly thought
necessary to a minister, were of dubious benefit. Students at Eastern
colleges would spend "four years ... at classical studies and no
God in them," and upon graduation such "learned students may under
stand their hie, Juiec, hoc, very well and may laugh at the humble
Christian and call him ignorant, although he may know how to win
more souls than five hundred of them." 7 Looking upon piety and intel
lect as being in open enmity, Finney found young ministers coming
"out of college with hearts as hard as the college walls." The trouble
with the "seminaries of learning" was that they attempted to "give
young men intellectual strength, to the almost entire neglect of culti
vating their moral feelings." "The race is an intellectual one. The excite
ment, the zeal, are all for the intellect. The young man . . . loses the
firm tone of spirituality. . . . His intellect improves, and his heart lies
waste." s

6 These opinions are all from Finney s Memoirs, chapter 7, "Remarks Upon
Ministerial Education," pp. 8597; cf. Finney *s Lectures on Revivals of Religion,
pp. 176-8.

7 McLoughlin: Modern Revivalism, pp. 118 2,0. The one field in -which educa
tion had Finney s approval, McLoughlin points out, was science. Like the Puritans
of old, he saw science not as a threat to religion but as a means of glorifying God.
The Middle Western church colleges have continued this regard for science, and
have produced a great many academic scientists. On the reasons for this, see the
stimulating discussion by R. H. Knapp and H. B. Goodrich: Origins of American
Scientists (Chicago, 1952), chapter 19.

8 Lectures on Revivals of Religion, pp. 4356.

95 Evangelicalism and the Revivalists

It is difficult to say whether Finney s description of American
ministerial education was accurate, but certainly his sentiments rep
resented the prevailing evangelical view. However prosperous the
state of intellect was among fledgling ministers, he was against it.

4

I have spoken of Finney at this length because he is a fair representa
tive of the Presbygational evangelical movement: he was neither the
most cultivated nor the crudest of its preachers. The effect of the
evangelical impulse, of the search for a new religious style to reach the
people and save souls, was to dilute the strong intellectual and educa
tional traditions of the Presbyterians and the Congregationalists. The
history of the Methodists, the largest church body and one vastly more
successful than the Presbyterians in converting the benighted Ameri
cans, presents an interesting contrast. The American Methodists be
gan without an intellectualist tradition and with little concern for
education or a highly trained ministry; but as time went on, as they
lost much of their sectarian spirit and became a settled church, they
attracted a membership whose concern for education grew with the
years. Before the middle of the nineteenth century, the church was
intermittently shaken by controversy between those who looked back
nostalgically to the days of the ignorant but effective circuit-riding
preachers and those who looked forward to the day when a better-
educated clergy would minister to a respectable laity. The history of
both the Methodists and the Baptists is an instructive illustration of the
divided soul of American religion. On one hand, many of the mem
bers of the church gave free expression to a powerfully anti-intellectual
evangelism; on the other, in any large church there was always a wing
which gave strong voice to a wistful respect for polite, decorative, and
largely non-controversial learning. In this regard, that division between
the redskin and the paleface which Philip Rahv has characterized as
a feature of American letters was prefigured in American religion.

John Wesley himself, an Oxford-trained cleric and a voracious
reader, combined in a curious way an extraordinary intellectual vigor
with a strong strain of credulity; he had set creditable intellectual
standards for Methodism, but his American followers were not vitally
interested in sustaining them. The nature of the evangelical spirit itself
no doubt made the evangelical revival anti-intellectualist, but Ameri-

THE RELIGION OF THE HEART 96

can conditions provided a particularly liberating milieu for its anti-
intellectual impulse. 9

Both Wesley himself and Francis Asbury, the first organizer of
American Methodism, were itinerant preachers, committed to itiner
ancy not out of convenience but out of principle. It was their belief that
a resident clergy ( as in many an English vicarage ) tended to go dead
and lose its grip on congregations, but itinerants could bring new life to
religion. On American soil the practice of itinerancy was a strategic
asset that made the Methodists particularly adept at winning the mo
bile American population back to Christianity. The bulwark and the
pride of the early American Methodists were the famous circuit-riding
preachers -who made up in mobility, flexibility, courage, hard work,
and dedication what they might lack in ministerial training or dignity.
These itinerants were justly proud of the strenuous sacrifices they made
to bring the gospel to the people. Ill-paid and overworked, they carried
out their mission in all weathers and under excruciating conditions of
travel. (During a particularly ferocious storm it used to be said: "There s
nobody out tonight but crows and Methodist preachers.") Their very
hardships seemed testimony enough to their sincerity, 1 and their

9 "It is a fundamental principle with us/* Wesley declared in answer to an early
detractor of Methodism, "that to renounce reason is to renounce religion, that re
ligion and reason go hand in hand, and that all irrational religion is false religion."
R. W. Burtner and R. E. Chiles: A Compend of Wesley s Theology (New York,
1 954)? p- ^6. But, as Norman Sykes has remarked, the influence of the evangelical
revival was nonetheless intellectually retrograde, for it rose partly from a reaction
against the rationalistic and Socinian tendencies that had grown out of the latitu-
dinarian movement in theology. By comparison with the leading theological
liberals, Wesley was "almost superstitious in his notions of the special interventions
of Providence attendant upon the most ordinary details of his life," Sykes remarks,
and "with Whitefield the situation was much worse, for he lacked altogether the
education and cultured influence of his colleague. . . /* Norman Sykes: Church
and State in England in the Eighteenth Century ( Cambridge, 1934 ), pp. 3989.

A. C. McGiffert writes of the evangelical revival in England: "It turned its
face deliberately toward the past instead of toward the future in its interpretation
of man and his need. It sharpened the issue between Christianity and the modern
age, and promoted the notion that the faith of the fathers had no message for their
children. Becoming identified in the minds of many with Christianity, its narrow
ness and mediaevalism, its emotionalism and lack of intellectuality, its crass
supernaturalism and Biblical literalism, its want of sympathy with art and science
and secular culture in general, turned them permanently against religion. In spite
of the great work accomplished by evangelicalism, the result in many quarters was
disaster/* Protestant Thought before Kant (New York, 1911), p. 175. On the
intellectual limitations of early American Methodism, see S. M. Duvall: The
Methodist Episcopal Church and Education up to 1869 (New York, 1928 ),
pp. 5-8, 12.

1 One thing these early churchmen understood was how much of their strength
lay in the fact that they were not differentiated from the laymen they served
either in culture or in style of living. An English visitor, accustomed to the dignity

97 Evangelicalism and the Revivalists

achievements in reclaiming the unchurched were often truly extraor
dinary. It was mainly by their efforts that American Methodism grew
from a little sect of some 3,000 members in 1775, four years after As-
bury s arrival, to the largest Protestant denomination, with over a mil
lion and a half members eighty years later.

Whatever claims might be made for the more educated ministry of
the high-toned denominations, the circuit-riders knew that their own
way of doing things worked. They evolved a kind of crude pietistic
pragmatism with a single essential tenet: their business was to save
souls as quickly and as widely as possible. For this purpose, the elabo
rate theological equipment of an educated ministry was not only an
unnecessary frill but in all probability a serious handicap; the only
justification needed by the itinerant preacher for his limited stock of
knowledge and ideas was that he got results, measurable in conversions.
To this justification very little answer was possible.

The Methodist leaders were aware, as their critics often observed,
that they appealed to the poor and the uneducated, and they proposed
to make a virtue of it. Francis Asbury, who was offended by the stu
dents at Yale because they were "very genteel," found even the
Quakers too "respectable" "Ah, there is death in that word/* 2 In the
country at large the Methodists easily outstripped the other denomina
tions in the race for conversions. It was significant that for them New
England, where the more settled populace was still somewhat more
acquainted with the standards of an educated ministry, presented the
stoniest soil, and that they made least headway there. But even there
the Methodists began to make incursions upon religious life in the early
nineteenth century. At first they ran up their banner in a fashion remi
niscent of the New England Awakening: "We have always been more
anxious to preserve a living rather than a learned ministry." 3 Jesse Lee,
the leader of New England Methodism, when challenged about his

of Anglican bishops, was astounded at his introduction to an Indiana Methodist
bishop in 1825. He was surprised to find that the bishop s residence was a com
mon farmhouse. As he waited with some impatience for the bishop to appear, he
was told by one of the American ministers that Bishop Roberts was coming. "I see a
man there, but no Bishop/" he said. "But that is certainly the Bishop, said the
American. "No! no! that cannot be, for the man is in his shirtsleeves." Bishop
Roberts had been at work on his property. Charles E. Elliott: The Life of the Rev.
Robert R. Roberts (New York, 1844), PP* 299300. On the frontier bishop, see
Elizabeth K. Nottingham: Methodism and the Frontier (New York, 1941), chap
ter 5.

2 George C. Baker, Jr.: An Introduction to the History of Early New England
Methodism, 1789-1839 (Durham, 1941), p. 18.

8 Ibid., p. 14.

THE RELIGION OF THE HEAKT 98

education ( a familiar experience there for Methodists competing with
the learned clergy), would simply reply that he had education enough
to get him around the country. 4 In time, New England became a test
case for the adaptability of the Methodists, and they were not found
wanting. A process of accommodation to respectability, gentility, and
education set in among them which was to herald later and less spec
tacular adaptations elsewhere.

The Methodists of Norwich, Connecticut, for instance, were de
scribed by a pamphleteer of 1800 as being "the most weak, unlearned,
ignorant, and base part of mankind." & But toward the middle of the
nineteenth century, a Congregationalist recalled the changes that had
taken place in the Methodist church of nearby Ridgefield in words
that might have applied widely elsewhere. 6

Though, in its origin, it seemed to thrive upon the outcasts of
society its people are now as respectable as those of any other
religious society in the town. No longer do they choose to worship
in barns, schoolhouses, and by-places; no longer do they affect
leanness, long faces, and loose, uncombed hair; no longer do they
cherish bad grammar, low idioms, and the euphony of a nasal
twang in preaching. . . . The preacher is a man of education,
refinement and dignity.

As Methodism diffused throughout the country, along the frontier
and into the South, in a milieu less demanding of educational per
formance, its original dissent from the respectable, the schooled, and
the established kept reasserting itself, but its own success again com
pelled it to wage a battle against the invading forces of gentility. In a
more decentralized church, each locality might have been more free
to set its own character, but in a denomination with the formidable

4 Ibid., p. 72. Cf . these words from a Methodist sermon reported to have been
delivered in Connecticut: "What I insist upon, my brethren and sisters, is this;
larnin isn t religion, and eddication don t give a man the power of the Spirit. It is
grace and gifts that furnish the real live coals from off the altar. St. Peter was a
fisherman <lo you think he ever went to Yale College? Yet he was the rock upon
which Christ built his church. No, no, beloved brethren and sisters. When the
Lord wanted to blow down the walls of Jericho, he didn t take a brass trumpet, or a
polished French horn; no such thing; he took a ram s horn a plain, natural rain s
horn just as it grew. And so, when he wants to blow down the walls of Jericho
... he don t take one of your smooth, polite, college learnt gentlemen, but a
plain, natural ram s horn sort of a man like me." S. G. Goodrich: Recollections
o-f a Lifetime ( New York, 1856 ), Vol. I, pp. 196-7-

5 Baker: op. cit., p. 16.

6 Goodrich: op. cit., p. 311.

gg Evangelicalism and the Revivalists

centralization of the Methodists, the fight over the cultural tone of the
church became general. One can follow changing views within the
church through one of its highbrows organs, The Methodist Magazine
and Quarterly Review, and its successor,, entitled after 1841 The
Methodist Quarterly Review. During the early 1830*5, it is clear, the
Methodists were still acutely aware of being the butt of attacks by the
more established religious groups; they were agitated by a difference
between those on the one hand who stood for the kind of preaching
represented by the itinerants and on the other hand laymen and edu
cated preachers who wanted reforms. 7 In 1834 the controversy was
brought to a head by an article by Reverend La Roy Sunderland,
which in effect proposed to undercut the very existence of the itiner
ants by requiring a good education of all Methodist preachers. "Has the
Methodist Church," he asked heatedly,

any usage or practice in any department of her membership from
which one might be led to infer that an education of any kind is
indispensably necessary before one can be licensed as a preacher
of the Gospel? Nay, are not many of her usages the most directly
calculated to give the impression that an education is not neces
sary? Do we not say in the constant practice of our . . . confer
ences, that, if one has gifts, grace, and a sound understanding, it is
enough?

Sunderland -was answered by a spokesman of the old school who said
that those who demanded an elaborate theological education were
guilty of looking upon preaching as "a lousiness/ a trade, a secular pro
fession like f law and medicine requiring a similar training/" The
existing ministry was not in fact ignorant, and to say so was merely to
"confirm all that our enemies have said." Had not the Methodists
opened their own academies, colleges, even their university? "All our
young men may now be educated, without having their morals en
dangered by corrupt and infidel teachers; and without having their
Methodism ridiculed out of them, by professors or presidents/* 8 As

7 Methodist Magazine and Quarterly Review, Vol. XII (January, 1830), pp. 16,
29-68; Vol. XII (April, 1830), pp. 162-97; Vol. XIII (April, 1831), pp. 160-87;
Vol. XIV ( July, 183* ) , pp. 377 ff -

8 La Roy Sunderland: "Essav on a Theological Education," Methodist Magazine
and Quarterly Review, Vol. XVI (October, 1834), p. 4^9- David M. Reese: "Brief
Strictures on the Rev. Mr. Sunderland s Essay on Theological Education/ "
Methodist Magazine and Quarterly Review, Vol. XVII (January, 1835), pp. 107,
114, US-

THE RELIGION OF THE HEART 100

time went on, the periodical itself reflected the victory of the reformers
over the old guard, since it ran f ewer reminiscences of the old-fashioned
itinerant ministers, which had long been a large part of its stock-in-
trade, and more essays on fundamental theological subjects and mat
ters of general intellectual interest.

The church, in fact, was in the throes of a significant change during
the 1830*5 and i84o s. The passion for respectability was winning sig
nificant victories over the itinerating-evangelical, anti-intellectualist
heritage from the previous generations. Again, the policy toward edu
cation, both for laymen and for ministers, was a focal issue. Earlier
Methodist efforts in education had been on the whole rather pathetic. 9
In its earliest days, the church was handicapped in its educational ef
forts not only by a lack of numbers but also by a lack of interest which
seemed to pervade it from the lowliest laymen up to Asbury himself. 1
Most Methodist laymen could not afford to do much for general educa
tion in any case, and theological education seemed a waste of time for
a ministry whose work it would be to preach a simple gospel to a sim
ple people.

Such early schools as were launched tended to fail for lack of sup-

9 The fate of the first Methodist "college/* Cokesbury College in Abingdon,
Maryland, may serve as an illustration. The project was the pet idea of Dr. Thomas
Coke, Wesley s emissary, who brought to America his alien Oxford-inspired notions
of education and succeeded in persuading the Methodists that they should found a
college, in spite of the objections of Asbury, who would have preferred a general
school such as Wesley had founded at Kingswood. Founded in 1787, the college
was combined at the beginning (as was so often the case with early American
colleges) with a preparatory school, which was far the more successful of the two.
Within a year of its founding, the college lost all three faculty members by resigna
tion. In 1794 the collegiate department was closed, leaving only the lower school;
plans to re-found the college were interrupted by two fires in 1795 and 1796, which
put an end to the project altogether. Asbury felt that it had been a waste of time
and money. "The Lord called not Mr. Whitefield nor the Methodists to build
colleges. I wished only for schools. . . ." The Journal and Letters of Francis
Asbury > ed. by Elmer T. Clark et al. (London and Nashville, 1958), Vol. II,
p. 75. See also Sylvanus M. Duvall: The Methodist Episcopal Church and Educa
tion up to 1869 (New York, 1928), pp. 31-6. The Virginia Episcopal evangelist,
I>evereux Jarratt, who knew something of the educational standards of the
Anglican ministry, was appalled by the Methodist effort at Abingdon: "Indeed, I
see not, how any considerate man could expect any great things from a seminary
of learning, while under the supreme direction and controul of tinkers and taylors,
weavers, shoemakers and country mechanics of all kinds or, in other words, of
men illiterate and wholly unacquainted with colleges and their contents/* The Life
of the Reverend Uevereuoc Jarratt Written by Himself (Baltimore, 1806), p. 181.
1 Nathan Bangs, the first noted historian of the church, remarked that early
Methodist hostility to learning became proverbial, and justly so. A History of the
Methodist Episcopal Church ( New York, 1842 ) , Vol. II, pp. 318-21.

Evangelicalism and the "Revivalists

port. But after the death of Asbury in 1816, a group of strong-minded
educational reformers, mainly from New England, went to work on
the increasingly numerous and receptive body of laymen. Their efforts
began to bear fruit in the late 1820*5, and Methodists began to sponsor
several academies and a few creditable little colleges. Wesleyan in
Connecticut, founded in 1831, was followed by Dickinson College
(taken over from the Presbyterians in 1833), Allegheny College
(1833), Indiana Asbury (founded in 1833, later DePauw), and Ohio
Wesleyan ( 1842), to mention only the most outstanding. From 1835 to
1860 the church started more than two hundred schools and colleges.
As in the past, many of the schools were but poorly supported and
maintained. The prevailing Methodist view of education was no doubt
mainly instrumental but it represented an advance over the period
when learning was not considered to be even of instrumental value to
religion. The passion of some of the leading ministers for a more
educated clergy, and the growing need to defend their theological
position from increasingly subtle critics, 2 finally broke through the
Methodist suspicion of a learned ministry. Theological seminaries were
still suspect, as f ountainheads of heresy; so the first two Methodist semi
naries were founded under the name of "Biblical Institutes." Again, the
leadership came from New England not where the Methodists were
strongest or most numerous, but where the competing educational
standards were most formidable. 3

The old guard never became reconciled to the newly emerging
Methodist church, with its apparatus of academies, colleges, semi
naries, and magazines. The most famous of the circuit-riders, Peter
Cartwright, included in his remarkable autobiography, written in 1856,
a full and forthright statement of the old-fashioned evangelical view
of the ministry which deserves quotation at length as a perfect em
bodiment of the anti-intellectualist position. 4

Suppose, now, Mr. Wesley had been obliged to wait for a liter
ary and theologically trained band of preachers before he moved

2 Ibid., Vol. Ill, pp. 15-18.

3 The first such seminary was not founded until 1847: it was the Methodist
General Biblical Institute, organized at Concord, New Hampshire, and later trans
ferred to Boston as the School of Theology of Boston University. It was followed by
the Garrett Biblical Institute, at Evanston, Illinois, in 1854. The third such institu
tion, Drew Theological Seminary, awaited the generosity of the famous Wall
Street pirate, Daniel Drew; it was founded in 1867.

4 Charles L. Wallis, ed.: Autobiography of Peter Cartwright (New York, 1956),
PP- 63-5, 266-8.

THE RELIGION OF TEEM HEART 102

in the glorious work o his day, what would Methodism have "been
in the Wesleyan connection today? ... If Bishop Asbury had
waited for this choice literary band of preachers, infidelity -would
have swept these United States from one end to the other. . . .

The Presbyterians, and other Calvinistic branches of the Protes
tant Church, used to contend for an educated ministry, for pews,
for instrumental music, for a congregational or stated salaried
ministry. The Methodists universally opposed these ideas; and
the illiterate Methodist preachers actually set the world on fire
(the American world at least) while they were lighting their
matches! . . .

I do not wish to undervalue education, but really I have seen
so many of these educated preachers who forcibly reminded me
of lettuce growing under the shade of a peach-tree, or like a gos
ling that had got the straddles by wading in the dew, that I turn
away sick and faint. Now this educated ministry and theological
training are no longer an experiment. Other denominations have
tried them, and they have proved a perfect failure. . . .

I awfully fear for our beloved Methodism. Multiply colleges,
universities, seminaries, and academies; multiply our agencies,
and editorships, and fill them with all our best and most efficient
preachers, and you localize the ministry and secularize them too;
then farewell to itinerancy; and when this fails we plunge right
into Congregationalism, and stop precisely where all other denomi
nations started. . . .

Is it not manifest that the employing so many of our preachers
in these agencies and professorships is one of the great causes why
we have such a scarcity of preachers to fill the regular work?
Moreover, these presidents, professors, agents, and editors get a
greater amount of pay, and get it more certainly too, than a trav
eling preacher, who has to breast every storm, and often falls very
far short of his disciplinary allowance. Here is a great temptation
to those who are qualified to fill those high offices to seek them,
and give up the regular work of preaching and trying to save
souls. . . .

Perhaps, among the thousands of traveling and local preachers
employed and engaged in this glorious work of saving souls, and
building up the Methodist Church, there were not fifty men that
had anything more than a common English education, and scores
of them not that; and not one of them was ever trained in a theo-

103 Evangelicalism and the Revivalists

logical school or Biblical institute, and yet hundreds of them
preached the Gospel with more success and had more seals to
their ministry than all the sapient, downy D.D/s in modern
times, who, instead of entering the great and wide-spread harvest-
field of souls, sickle in hand, are seeking presidencies or profes
sorships in colleges, editorships, or any agencies that have a fat
salary, and are trying to create newfangled institutions where
good livings can be monopolized, while millions of poor, dying
sinners are thronging the way to hell without God, without Gos
pel. . . .

I will not condescend to stop and say that I am a friend to learn
ing, and an improved ministry, for it is the most convenient way
to get rid of a stubborn truth, for these learned and gentlemanly
ministers to turn about and say that all those ministers that are op
posed to the present abuses of our high calling, are advocates for
ignorance, and that ignorance is the mother of devotion. What
has a learned ministry done for the world, that have studied
divinity as a science? Look, and examine ministerial history. It is
an easy thing to engender pride in the human heart, and this ed
ucational pride has been the downfall and ruin of many preemi
nently educated ministers of the Gospel. But I will not render evil
for evil, or railing for railing, but will thank God for education, and
educated Gospel ministers who are of the right stamp, and of the
right spirit. But how do these advocates for an educated ministry
think the hundreds of commonly educated preachers must feel
under the lectures we have from time to time on this subject?
It is true, many of these advocates for an improved and educated
ministry among us, speak in rapturous and exalted strains con
cerning the old, illiterate pioneers that planted Methodism and
Churches in early and frontier times; but I take no flattering
unction to my soul from these extorted concessions from these
velvet-mouthed and downy D.D/s; for their real sentiments, if
they clearly express them, are, that we were indebted to the igno
rance of the people for our success.

This was, no doubt, exactly the sentiment that some of the critics of
the itinerants meant to express; but Cartwright might well have seen
fit to concede that there was some truth in their case. Not all his evan
gelical brothers would have denied it. As one group of evangelical
workers had put it years earlier to Finney : "It is more difficult to labour

THE RELIGION OF THE HEART 104

with educated men, with cultivated minds and moreover predisposed
to skepticism, than with the uneducated/* 5

5

In many respects the history of the Baptists recapitulates that of the
Methodists; but since the Baptists were much less centralized, still
more uncompromising, still more disposed to insist on a ministry with
out educational qualifications and even without salary, they yielded to
change later and less extensively than the Methodists. As William
Warren Sweet observes: < Among no other religious body was the preju
dice against an educated and salaried ministry so strong as among the
Baptists, and this prejudice prevailed not only among frontier Baptists,
but pretty generally throughout the denomination in the early years of
the nineteenth century." 6

The Baptists, of course, had had bitter experiences with educated
ministers and established churches, both in Congregational Mas
sachusetts and Anglican Virginia, where they had been much per
secuted. Characteristically, they supplied their ministry from the
ranks of their own people. The Baptist preacher might be a farmer who
worked on his land or a carpenter who worked at his bench like any
other layman, and who left his work for Sunday or weekday sermons or
for baptisms and funerals. He had little or no time for books. Such hard
working citizens did not relish competition from other preachers, and
they resisted with the most extraordinary ferocity even the home mis
sionary societies which attempted to join with them in spreading the
gospel throughout the hinterland. In this resistance to "outside" inter
ference and centralized control they indoctrinated their followers.
The word went out that anyone who had to do with the missionary
societies would not be welcomed into the Baptist Associations. "We
cannot receive into fellowship either churches or members who join
one of those unscriptural societies," declared a Kentucky Baptist
Association. And an Illinois group, manifesting in its almost paranoid

5 Charles C. Cole: The Social Ideas of Northern Evangelists, 182,6-1860 (New
York, 1954), P- So. Sam Jones, one of the most successful revivalists of the Gilded
Age, later said that he preferred to work in the South: "I find the people further
South are more easily moved. They haven t got the intellectual difficulties that
curse the other portions of the country." McLoughlin: Modern Revivalism, pp. 299
300.

6 Religion in the Development of American Culture (New York, 1952), p. in.

105 Evangelicalism and the Revivalists

extreme a suspicion against authority, declared in a circular letter:
"We further say to the churches, have nothing to do with the Bible
Society, for we think it dangerous to authorize a few designing men to
translate the holy Bible. Stand fast in the liberty wherewith Christ has
set you free, and be not entangled with the yoke of bondage.** 7 One
should, I think, check one s impulse to wonder whether the Bible was
to be translated by a national convention, and remember that Baptist
suspicions had been kept alive by the memory of early persecutions
and cruel ridicule. 8

Baptists opposed missions in good part because they opposed the
centralization of authority. Any concession to central church organiza
tion, they felt, would be a step toward "the Pope of Rome and the
Mother of Harlots/* Their uneducated and unsalaried ministers in
evitably resented the encroachments of a better-educated and better-
paid ministry. It was easy for an unpaid preacher to believe that the
educated missionaries from the East were working only for the money it
brought them. 9 A contemporary observer concluded that the unedu
cated preachers were thoroughly aware of their own limitations. But
"instead of rejoicing that the Lord had provided better gifts to pro
mote the cause, they felt the irritability of wounded pride, common to
narrow and weak minds." This diagnosis was confirmed by the candid
retort of a Baptist preacher to a moderator who pointed out that, after
all, no one was compelled to listen to missionaries or to give them
money unless he chose. "Well, if you must know, Brother Moderator,
you know the big trees in the woods overshadow the little ones; and
these missionaries will be all great men, and the people will all go to
hear them preach, and we shall be all put down. That s the objec
tion." 1

The Baptists, however, like the old-guard Methodists, could not
absolutely resist the pressure for an educated ministry. Here the desire

7 W. W. Sweet, ed.: Religion on the American Frontier The Baptists, 1783
1830 (New York, 1931), p. 6sn.

8 Cf. an early Virginia version of the Baptists: "Some of them were hair-lipped,
others were blear-eyed, or hump-backed, or bow-legged, or clump-footed; hardly
any of them looked like other people." Walter B. Posey: The Baptist Church in the
Lower Mississippi Valley, 17761845 (Lexington, Kentucky, 1957), p. ^-

Sweet: Religion on the American Frontier, p. 72. "Money and Theological
learning seem to be the pride, we fear, of too many preachers of our day/* Ibid.,
p. 65.

1 Ibid., pp. 734. On the intellectual condition of Baptist preachers and the
resistance of preachers and laymen to education, see Posey: op. cit., chapter a.

RELIGION OF THE HEART 106

for self-respect and for the respect of others went hand in hand. A Vir
ginia Baptist Association, seeking to found a seminary as early as 1789,
gave the folio wing reason: 2

Our brethren of other denominations around us Could no longer
curse us for not knowing the Law, or discard and Reprobate a
great deal of our Teaching for not knowing our Mother tongue,
much less the original languages, and if we (in this as we ought in
everything), do it with a single eye to The glory of God, and the
advancement of the Redeemer s interest Then shall we have suf
ficient to hope we shall meet with heaven^ approbation.

The Baptist laymen were divided between their desire for respecta
bility and their desire for a congenial and inexpensive ministry. By
1830 Baptist leaders had made considerable progress toward providing
an educated and salaried ministry, as well as toward raising the
educational level of the laity itself. But it was slow work to transform
the original bias of the Baptist churches, and it required a constant
struggle against entrenched revivalist influences. 3

. 6

After the Civil War, important structural changes occurred in the posi
tion of the churches. Bringing Christianity to the people of the growing
cities became more and more urgent; it became increasingly difficult
as well, since the churches had to find ways of adapting to the sensibili
ties of the urban -worker and of coping with his poverty, as well as hold
ing migrants from the countryside. The interest of revivalists in the
cities, which had risen markedly even in the 1840*3 and 1850*5, now
took on special urgency. From the time of Dwight L. Moody to that of
Billy Graham, success in making conversions in the big cities and on
an international scale has been the final test of an evangelist s im
portance. The exhorter whose appeal was limited to the countryside
and the small towns was never more than third rate.

Moody was by far the most imposing figure between Finney and
Billy Sunday. The son of a poor brickmason in Northfield, Massa
chusetts, he lost his father at an early age, and was converted at
eighteen by a Congregational pastor who had been an itinerant evan-

2 Wesley M. Gewehr: The Great Awakening in Virginia, 27401790 (Durham,
North Carolina, 1930 ), p. ^256.

s For efforts in behalf of education, see Posey: op. cit., chapter 8.

107 Evangelicalism and the Revivalists

gelist. In his early twenties Moody was already involved in the religious
and welfare activity that had begun in the cities in the decade before
the Civil War. Although very successful as a wholesale shoe salesman
in Chicago, he decided in 1860 to give up business for independent
mission work. During the war he was active in the Y.M.C.A., and soon
after the war s end he became president of the Chicago branch. Un
schooled since his thirteenth year, he never sought ordination, and
never became a minister.

Before 1873, Moody s main achievements were in Y.M.C.A. and
Sunday-school work, though he had demonstrated enterprise and curi
osity by twice making trips to Great Britain to look into the methods
of Christian leaders there. In 1873 he had his first major success when
he was invited by British acquaintances to come and conduct a series of
evangelical meetings. Taking with him his organist and singer, Ira E>.
Sankey, he launched in the summer of 1873 upon a two-year series of
meetings that brought him to York, Edinburgh, Glasgow, Belfast,
Dublin, Manchester, Sheffield, Birmingham, Liverpool, and London. It
was estimated that over two and a half millions heard Moody in Lon
don alone. Britain had not known such impressive preaching since the
days of Wesley and Whitefield. He had left America in obscurity, and
he returned in the full blaze of fame; from 1875 to his death in 1899 he
was not only the unchallenged leader of a new phase in American
evangelism but the greatest figure in American Protestantism.

Moody was quite unlike Finney. Whereas Finney overwhelmed
audiences with an almost frightening power, Moody was a benign and
lovable man, much happier holding out the promise of heaven than
warning of the torments of hell. Short, corpulent, and full-bearded, he
resembled General Grant, and the resemblance was more than physi
cal. Like Grant, Moody was inordinately simple, yet of powerful will;
and his sieges of souls showed some of the same determined capacity
for organization that went into the siege of Vicksburg. Like Grant, he
could bring overwhelming superiority in force to bear at the point of
weakness, until resistance wore down. Like Grant, he hid his intensity
behind an unpretentious fagade. Here the resemblance ends- Grant
did what he had to do, in spite of an inner lack of confidence; he had
been lost in the business world before his war career and he was to be
lost again in politics afterwards. Moody s self-confidence was enormous.
He had been well on his way toward a fortune when, still very young,
he gave up business for religion; and it is hard to imagine him failing
in any practical sphere of life in which endurance, shrewdness,

THE RELIGION OF x H E HEART 108

decision, simple manliness, and a human touch were the prime requi
sites. He was immensely ignorant ignorant even of grammar, as critics
of his sermons were forever saying; but he knew his Bible and he knew
his audiences. Unsensational, untiring, he repeatedly confronted them
with his inevitable question; ~Are you a Christian?" and swept them
along toward salvation with breathless torrents of words uttered in a
voice that easily filled the huge auditoriums in which he flourished.

Moody s message was broad and nondenominational it is signifi
cant that he had the endorsement at one time or another of practically
every denomination except the Roman Catholics, the Unitarians, and
the Universalists 4 and he cared not a whit for the formal discussion
of theological issues ("My theology! I didn t know I had any. I wish
you would tell me what my theology is."). 5 The knowledge, the culture,
the science of his time meant nothing to him, and when he touched
upon them at all, it was with a note as acid as he was ever likely to
strike. In this respect, he held true to the dominant evangelical tradi
tion. Although he had no desire to undermine the established ministry
or its training, he cordially approved of laymen in religious work and
felt that seminary-educated ministers "are often educated away from
the people." 6 He denigrated all education that did not serve the pur
poses of religion f or secular education, he said, instead of telling men
what a bad lot they are, flatters them and tells them "how angelic they
are because they have some education. An educated rascal is the
meanest kind of rascal." Aside from the Bible, he read almost nothing.
"I have one rule about books. I do not read any book, unless it will
help me to understand the book." Novels? They were "flashy. ... I
have no taste for them, no desire to read them; but if I did I would not
do it." The theater? "You say it is part of one s education to see good
plays. Let that kind of education go to the four winds." Culture? It is
"all right in its place," but to speak of it before a man is born of God is
"the height of madness." Learning? An encumbrance to the man of
spirit: "I would rather have zeal without knowledge; and there is a
good deal of knowledge without zeal." Science? It had become, by
Moody s time, a threat to religion rather than a means for the discovery
and glorification of God. "It is a great deal easier to believe that man
was made after the image of God than to believe, as some young men

4 McLoughlin: Modern Revivalism, pp.

5 Gamaliel Bradford: D. L. Moody: A Worker in Souls (New York, 19^27), p. 61.

6 McLoughlin: Modern Revivalism, p. 2,73.

log Evangelicalism and the Revivalists

and women are being taught now, that he is the offspring of a mon
key r 7

True to the evangelical tradition in his attitude toward intellect and
culture, Moody nevertheless marked for his generation a new depar
ture in the history of revivalism, a departure not from goals or attitudes
but from methods. In the days of Jonathan Edwards and his con
temporaries, it had been customary to look upon revivals as the con
sequence of divine visitations. Edwards had referred to the Northamp
ton revival, in the title of his first great work, as a "surprising work of
God"; and it was the adjective here that suggested the Northampton
preacher s conception that the affair was not altogether in the control
of human will. Whitefield, one surmises, knew better; as a veteran
promoter of revivals, he must have had more than an inkling that
human will had something to do with it. The preferred theory, none
the less, was that divine intervention was the essential active agent and
that the human will was relatively passive. By the time of Finney, this
notion was in decline, and the voluntarism characteristic of the Ameri-
can evangelical tradition was in the ascendant. "Religion is the work of
man" Finney insisted. It is true, he admitted, that God interposes his
spirit to make men obey His injunctions. But the spirit is always at
work it is, as we would now say, a constant; the human response is the
variable. Revivals take place when the human will rises to the oc
casion. A revival of religion, Finney asserted, "is not a miracle, or de
pendent on a miracle, in any sense. It is a purely philosophical result
of the right use of the constituted means." Hence, it was false and
slothful to sit and wait for the miraculous reoccurrence of revivals. "You
see why you have not a revival. It is only because you don t want
one." 8

Finney* s Lectures on Revivals of Religion were wholly devoted to
showing what the right means were and how revivals could be pro
duced, so to speak, at will. But it is noteworthy that the means about
which Finney was speaking were not simply mechanical; they were
not mere techniques; they were a series of instructions as to how the
heart, the mind, and the will could all be marshaled to the great end
of reviving religion. Here is where Moody and his generation, adapting

7 Bradford: Moody, pp. 24, 25-6, 30, 35, 37, 64,

8 Lectures on Revivals of Religion., pp. 9, 12, 3^. I have hardly done justice to
the full range of Finney s argument for the role of human agency in bringing about
revivals; it is stated cogently in the first chapter of his book.

THE RELIGION OF THE HEART no

revivalism to the spirit of the new industrial age, made their departure.
It would be impertinent to suggest that a man of Moody s force and
sincerity lacked the necessary inward psychic resources; but it is im
portant to note that he added something else the techniques of
business organization. Finney s revivalism belonged to the age of An
drew Jackson and Lyman Beecher; Moody s belonged to the age of
Andrew Carnegie and P. T. Barnum.

Finney*s revivals, though carefully planned, had been conducted
without much apparatus. Moody s brought an imposing machinery
into play. 9 Advance agents were sent to arrange invitations from
local evangelical ministers. Advertising campaigns were launched,
requiring both display posters and newspaper notices (the latter in
serted in the amusement pages). Churches, even the largest, could
no longer seat the crowds. Large auditoriums had to be found, and
where there were none they had to be erected. If temporary, they
were afterwards sold and scrapped for what they would bring. The
building for Moody s Boston meetings cost $32,000. To defray his
imposing expenses a series of meetings in one city might require
from $30,000 (New York) to $140,000 (London) finance commit
tees were established; through them the resources of local businessmen
could be tapped. But Moody did not have to depend only upon small
businessmen. Cyrus McCormick and George Armour helped him in
Chicago, Jay Cooke and John Wanamaker in Philadelphia, J. P. Mor
gan and Cornelius Vanderbilt II in New York. The meetings re
quired staffs of local ushers to handle the crowds, staffs of assistants
for follow-ups on the spiritual condition of Moody s converts in after-
sermon "inquiry" sessions. Then there were the arrangements for the
music Sankey s singing and his organ, the recruitment of teams of
local singers for choirs of from 600 to 1,000 persons for each city. Like
almost anything else in business, the results of Moody s meetings be
came the object of measurement. At first Moody himself objected to
making estimates of the numbers of souls saved 3,000, they said,
in London, 2,500 in Chicago, 3,5 in New York but in later years he
began to use "decision cards" to record systematically the names and
addresses of those who came to the inquiry room.

Finney, we have seen, was proud that some of his legal training car
ried over into his most rational sermons. Perhaps less self-consciously,

9 See the excellent account of Moody s revival machinery, in McLoughlin:
Modern Revivalism, chapter 5, "Old Fashioned Revival with the Modern Improve
ments/*

in Evangelicalism and the Revivalists

Moody *s preaching revealed his early business experience. At times he
talked like a salesman of salvation. He seemed still to be selling a
product when he mounted a chair at an "inquiry" meeting to say:
"Wholl take Christ now? That s all you want. With Christ you have
eternal life and everything else you need. Without Him you must
perish. He offers Himself to you. Who ll take Him?" x Or when he was
heard to say: "If a man wants a coat he wants to get the best coat he
can for the money. This is the law the world around. If we show men
that religion is better than anything else, we shall win the world,"
one can only concur with the judgment of Gamaliel Bradford that
this is "the dialect of the shoe-trade/ 2 The point was not lost on con
temporaries. "As he stood on the platform/* Lyman Abbott wrote of
Moody, "he looked like a business man; he dressed like a business
man; he took the meeting in hand as a business man would; he spoke
in a business man s fashion." 3

Whereas Finney had been a radical on at least one major social is
sue, that of slavery, Moody was consistently conservative; the union
between the evangelical and the business mind which was to char
acterize subsequent popular revivalists was, to a great extent, his work.
His political views invariably resembled those of the Republican
businessmen who supported him, and he was not above making it
clear how useful the Gospel was to the propertied interests. "I say to
the rich men of Chicago, their money will not be worth much if com
munism and infidelity sweep the land/ Again: There can be no bet
ter investment for the capitalists of Chicago than to put the saving salt
of the Gospel into these dark homes and desperate centers. . . ." But
it would be wrong to suggest that he was pandering. His conservatism
was a reflection of his pre-millennialist beliefs, which in him engen
dered a thoroughgoing social pessimism. Man was naturally and thor
oughly bad, and nothing was to be expected of him on earth. "I have
heard of reform, reform, until I am tired and sick of the whole thing.
It is regeneration by the power of the Holy Ghost that we need/ As a
consequence, Moody showed no patience for any kind of sociological
discussion. 4 Man was, and always had been, a failure in all his works:
The true task was to get as many souls as possible off the sinking ship
of this world.

1 Bernard Weisberger: They Gathered at the River, p.

2 Op. cit., p. 243-

8 Silhouettes of My Contemporaries (New York, 1921), p. 2,00.
4 McLoughlin: Modern Revivalism, pp. 167, 2,69, 2,78; Bradford: op. cit.,
pp. 3301.

THE RELIGION OF THE HEART 112,

. 7

In one important respect, the revivalism of Moody s era had to be more
controlled than its predecessors. The "enthusiastic" manifestations of
the old-time revivals the shriekings, groanings, faintings, howlings,
and barkings were now inadmissible. It was not merely that pietism
had grown more restrained, but that the city revivals took place un
der the critical eye of the urban press and nothing could be allowed to
happen that would lose the sympathetic interest of the public. The
loss of control that had been permissible in village churches and at
camp meetings might also have created dangerous scenes in the huge
auditoriums of the big-time revivals. The most intelligent sympathizers
of revivals had always found the extreme manifestations of enthusiasm
an embarrassment. Finney, though he regularly induced them, thought
of them as necessary encumbrances and evils. Moody, determined to
have done with them, would interrupt a sermon to have ushers re
move a disturbed member of the audience. Even an excess of
"Am ens" or "Hallelujahs" would bring him to call out: "Never mind, my
friend, I can do all the hollering/ 5 His successor, Billy Sunday, believ
ing that "a man can be converted without any fuss," held a stern hand
over audiences, and instructed ushers to throw out disorderly mani-
festants. "Two can t wind jam at once, brother; let me do it," he once
yelled. And on another occasion: "Just a minute, sister, hold your
sparker back and save a little gasoline." 6 Decorum of a sort was to
be kept; and there must be no distractions from the performance of the
star.

Although the conditions of city evangelism demanded restraint in
audiences, they seem to have released the preachers. For the historian
of popular sensibilities, one of the most arresting aspects of the de
velopment of evangelicalism is the decline of the sermon from the
vernacular to the vulgar. The conception that preaching should be
plain, unaffected, unlearned, and unadorned, so that it would reach
and move simple people, had always been central to pietism. Fin
ney had argued that the truly good sermon, like the truly good life,
would be trimmed of elegance and pretense. He had spoken movingly
for the vernacular style in sermons, and preferred the extemporane-

5 McLoughlin: Modern Revivalism, p. 245; c. Bradford: op. cit., p.

6 McLoughlin: Modern Revivalism, p. 4334; also Bitty Sunday Was His Real
Name, pp. 1278.

H3 Evangelicalism and the Revivalists

ous to the written sermon because spontaneous utterance would be
more direct and closer to common speech. When men are entirely in
earnest, he said, "their language is in point, direct and simple. Their
sentences are short, cogent, powerful/ They appeal to action and get
results. "This is the reason why, formerly, the ignorant Methodist
preachers, and the earnest Baptist preachers produced so much more
effect than our most learned theologians and divines. They do so
now." 7

One can hardly resist the cogency of Finney s pleas for the vernacu
lar sermon. Is there not, after all, an element of the vernacular In most
good preaching? One thinks, for example, of Luther visualizing the
Nativity for his listeners with the utmost directness and intimacy: 8

Bad enough that a young bride married only a year could not
have had her baby at Nazareth in her own house instead of mak
ing all that journey of three days when heavy with child! . . .
The birth was still more pitiable. No one regarded this young wif e
bringing forth her first-born. No one took her condition to heart.
. . . There she was without preparation: no light, no fire, in the
dead of night, in thick darkness. ... I think myself if Joseph and
Mary had realized that her time was so close she might perhaps
have been left in Nazareth. . . . Who showed the poor girl what
to do? She had never had a baby before. I am amazed that the lit
tle one did not freeze.

Perhaps, too, the plain style of Finney s own utterance was no more
than an inheritance from the best Puritan preaching. Surely the great
est image in the history of American preaching was Jonathan Ed-
wards s image of the soul as a spider held over the fire in the kitchen
stove, suspended by a silken thread at the mercy of God. And is it not
the vernacular note itself which has given American literature much
of its originality and distinction?

All true enough, and justification enough for Finney s own concep
tion of the sermon. The problem for later evangelism was to stabilize
the vernacular style at some point before it would merely confirm, or

7 Memoirs, pp. 90-1. Finney s conception of preaching is expounded at length to
Lectures on Revivals of Religion, chapter 12. Among his rules for the manner of
ministerial discourse were these: "It should be conversational." "It must be in the
language of common life." It should be parabolical that is, illustrations should be
drawn from real or supposed incidents of common life, and "from the common
business of society/ It should be repetitious, but without monotony.

8 Roland H. Bainton: Here I Stand: A Life of Martin Luther (New York and
Nashville, 1940), p. 354-

THE RELIGION OF THE HEART 114

even exaggerate, the coarsest side of popular sensibility. A contem
porary of Finney s, Jabez Swan, was no doubt merely adding a racy
colloquial touch when he described Jonah s fish in these terms: 9

The great fish splashed, foamed, and pitched up and down, here
and there, and everywhere, to get rid of his burden. At length,
growing more and more sick, as well he might, he made for the
shore and vomited the nauseous dose out of his mouth.

Moody s preaching, spilled out at 220 words a minute, was colloquial
without being coarse, though Moody, as befitted his time, introduced a
heavy note of sentimentality that Finney might have found strange.
Like Finney, Moody was impatient with what he called "essay preach
ing/* "It is a stupid thing to try to be eloquent," he said. 1 Conventional
audiences were put off by his f olkish informality ( "Everyone is going
to be disappointed in these meetings if he ain t quickened himself")
and the London Saturday Review found him "simply a ranter of the
most vulgar type. 9 2 But in the main, his sermons stopped short of
vulgarity. Younger contemporaries, such as Sam Jones, were striking a
broader and more aggressive tone: "Half of the literary preachers in
this town are A.B/s, Ph.D s, D.D/s, LL.D/s, and A.S.S/s." "If anyone
thinks he can t stand the truth rubbed in a little thicker and faster
than he ever had it before, he d better get out of here." 3 It was this
note, and not Moody s, that was to be imitated by Billy Sunday.

With the arrival of Billy Sunday, whose career as an evangelist spans
the years 1896 to 1935, one reaches the nadir in evangelical rhetoric.
By comparison, a contemporary of ours like Billy Graham seems aston
ishingly proper and subdued. Sunday s career in some ways parallels
Moody s. His father had been an Iowa bricklayer who died in the
Union Army in 1862. Sunday had a rather poverty-stricken country
boyhood, left high school before graduating, and was picked up in
1883 by a scout for the Chicago White Stockings baseball team. From
1883 to 1891, Sunday made his living as a ballplayer. His later career
sounds as though one of the ineffable egomaniac outfielders of Ring
Lardner s stories had got religion and turned to evangelism. Like
Moody, Billy Sunday went into evangelical work through the Y.M.C.A.

& McLoughlin: Modern Revivalism., p. 140.

1 Bradford: op. cit., p. 101. On his preaching style, see also McLoughlin:
Modern Revivalism, pp. 239 ff.; there is a wide range of illustrative matter in
J. Wilbur Chapman: The Life and Work of Dtoight L. Moody (Boston, 1900).

2 Bradford: op. cit., p. 103.

8 McLoughlin: Modern Revivalism, p. 288.

ii5 Evangelicalism and the Revivalists

A convert in 1886, he began to give Y.M.C.A. talks, worked as a
Y.M.C.A. secretary after leaving baseball, and started preaching in
1896. Unlike Moody, who accepted his own lay status, Sunday hun
gered for ordination, and in 1903 faced a board of examiners of the
Chicago Presbytery. After a series of answers in the general tenor of
"That s too deep for me," the examination was waived on the ground
that Sunday had already made more converts than all his examiners,
and he was elevated to the ministry without further inquiry.

After 1906 Sunday left the small towns of the Midwest, where he
had his early successes, and began to reach the medium-sized towns.
By 1909 he was an established big-time evangelist in the major cities,
the heir to Moody s mantle. In one way or another, political leaders
like Bryan, Wilson, and Theodore Roosevelt gave him their blessings;
tycoons opened their coffers to him, as they had to Moody; the re
spectable world found him respectable; and millions came to hear him.
In 1914 the readers of the American Magazine, responding to a poll
on the question: "Who is the greatest man in the United States?" put
hfrn in eighth place, tied with Andrew Carnegie. He conducted his
evangelical enterprise in most external respects in a manner similar to
Moody s; but there were two important differences. Moody had
needed and sought the invitations of local ministers; Sunday went
further and often bulldozed reluctant clerics until they fell in line. And
Moody had lived comfortably but without great wealth, whereas Sun
day became a millionaire, and replied to critics of the cost of his re
vivals by saying: "What I m paid for my work makes it only about $2
a soul, and I get less proportionately for the number I convert than any
other living evangelist/ Both men were immensely businesslike, but
Moody s personal indulgence was limited to heavy meals, and Sunday
wore ostentatious clothes. With his striped suits, hard collars, diamond
pins and studs, shiny patent-leather shoes, and spats, he resembled a
hardware drummer out to make time with the girls. Like Moody, he
had his musical accompanist, Homer A. Rodeheaver; but Sankey had
sung sweetly, and Rodeheaver began to jazz the hymns. 4

Finney would have marveled at Sunday s style, and at the elements
of entertainment in the work of this revivalist, who hired a circus
giant as a doorman, broke into broad imitations of his contem
poraries (one of Finney s most solemn injunctions had been against
levity), shed his coat and vest during a heated sermon, and punctuated

4 On Sunday s life, see William G. McLoughlin s thorough and perceptive
biography: Billy Sunday Was His Real Name.

THE RELIGION OF THE HEART 116

bis harangues with feats of physical agility on the platform. Sunday
-was proud of his slanginess. "What do I care if some puff-eyed little
dibbly-dibbly preacher goes tibbly-tibbling around because I use plain
Anglo-Saxon words? I want people to know what I mean and that s
why I try to get down where they live.** Literary preachers, he said,
tried "to please the highbrows and in pleasing them miss the masses/
The language used by Moody, simple though it was, lacked savor
enough for Sunday. Moody had said: "The standard of the Church is
so low that it does not mean much." Sunday asserted: "The bars of the
Church are so low that any old hog with two or three suits of clothes
and a bank roll can crawl through." Moody had been content with:
~We don t want intellect and money-power, but the power of God s
word." Sunday elaborated: "The church in America would die of dry
rot and sink forty-nine fathoms in hell if all members were multimil
lionaires and college graduates/ 5

Classic folkish preaching had tried to treat Biblical stories in realistic
intimacy; Sunday had the powers of darkness and light talking in cur
rent small-town lingo. In his sermons the Devil tempted Jesus with
these words: "Turn some of these stones into bread and get a square
meal! Produce the goods!" and he told the miracle of the loaves in this
way:

But Jesus looked around and spied a little boy whose ma had
given him five biscuits and a couple of sardines for his lunch, and
said to him, "Come here, son, the Lord wants you/ Then He told
the lad what He wanted, and the boy said, "It isn t much, Jesus,
but what there is you re mighty welcome to it."

Those who were appalled in the 1920*5 by the vulgarity of Bruce Bar
ton s The Man Nobody Knows may not have realized how much Sun
day had done to pave the way for Barton s portrayal of Christ as a go-
getter: "Jesus could go some; Jesus Christ could go like a six-cylinder
engine, and if you think Jesus couldn t, you re dead wrong." He felt it
important also to establish the point that Jesus "was no dough-faced,
lick-spittle proposition. Jesus was the greatest scrapper that ever
lived." 6

5 McLoughlin: Billy Sunday, pp. 164, 169.

6 Weisberger: They Gathered at the River, p. 248; McLoughlin : Billy Sunday,
pp. 177, 179. Sunday s language here expresses a new violence of expression, very
common among the clergy during the First World War. See Ray H. Abrams:
Preachers Present Arms ( New York, 1933 ) .

[ H7 1

CHAPTER V

The Revolt against
Modernity

B

ILLY SUNDAY S rhetorical coarseness was a surface phenomenon,
less important for itself than for what it revealed about the position of
evangelism in his time. Underlying the slang and the vulgarity was a
desperately embattled spirit that would have been quite unfamiliar to
Finney or Moody. It is true that these earlier evangelists were also em
battled embattled with the forces of hell, and militant in the saving
of souls. But Sunday was embattled in addition and at times one sus
pects even primarily with the spirit of modernism. Quite aside from
purely personal temperament, which has its importance too, his tone
derives its significance and popularity from the travail of fundamen
talism in a waning phase of its history.

As we move into the twentieth century, we find the evangelical tra
dition rapidly approaching a crisis. The first part of this crisis was
internal: it was no longer possible to put off or avoid a choice between
the old religious ways and modernism, since the two had come into
more open and more universal confrontation. Fundamentalists, both
lay and clerical, were anguished to see a large portion of the great
evangelical denominations, the Baptists and Methodists, succumb at
least in part to modernist ideas, and their resentment against these
defectors added to their bitterness. The second part was external:
secular challenges to religious orthodoxy were older than the nation
itself, but the force of Darwinism, combined with the new urban style,

THE RELIGION OF THE HEART 118

gave such challenges an unprecedented force. Moreover, the expand
ing education and the mobility of the whole country, and the develop
ment of a nationwide market in ideas, made it increasingly difficult for
the secular, liberated thought of the intelligentsia and the scriptural
faith of the fundamentalists to continue to move in separate grooves.
So long as secularism in its various manifestations was an elite affair,
fundamentalists could either ignore it or look upon it as a convenient
scapegoat for militant sermons. But now the two were thrown into
immediate and constant combat this was the first consequence for
religion of the development of a mass culture, and of its being thrown
into contact with high culture.

I do not want to suggest that a kind of quiet religious withdrawal
from the mental environment of secular culture ceased to be possible;
but for many combative types it ceased to be desirable. Religion, for
many individuals or groups, may be an expression of serene belief,
personal peace, and charity of mind. But for more militant spirits it
may also be a source or an outlet for animosities. There is a militant
type of mind to which the hostilities involved in any human situation
seem to be its most interesting or valuable aspect; some individuals
live by hatred as a kind of creed, and we can follow their course
through our own history in the various militant anti-Catholic move
ments, in anti-Masonry, and a variety of crank enthusiasms. There are
both serene and militant fundamentalists; and it is hard to say which
group is the more numerous. My concern here is with the militants,
who have thrown themselves headlong into the revolt against mod
ernism in religion and against modernity in our culture in general. We
are here dealing, then, with an ever smaller but still far from minus
cule portion of the whole body of the evangelical tradition a type
which has found that it can compensate with increasing zeal and enter
prise for the shrinkage in its numbers.

The two new notes which are evident in a most striking form in Billy
Sunday s rhetoric, the note of toughness and the note of ridicule and
denunciation, may be taken as the signal manifestations of a new kind
of popular mind. One can trace in Sunday the emergence of what I
would call the one-hundred per cent mentality a mind totally com
mitted to the full range of the dominant popular fatuities and deter
mined that no one shall have the right to challenge them. This type of
mentality is a relatively recent synthesis of fundamentalist religion
and fundamentalist Americanism, very often with a heavy overlay of

iig The Revolt against Modernity

severe fundamentalist morality. 1 The one-hundred percenter, who will
tolerate no ambiguities, no equivocations, no reservations, and no criti
cism, considers his kind of committedness an evidence of toughness
and masculinity. One observer remarked of Sunday that no man of the
time, "not even Mr. Roosevelt himself, has insisted so much on his
personal, militant masculinity." Jesus was a scrapper, and his disciple
Sunday would destroy the notion that a Christian must be "a sort of
dishrag proposition, a wishy-washy sissified sort of galoot that lets
everybody make a doormat out of him/ "Lord save us from off-handed,
flabby-cheeked, brittle-boned, weak-kneed, thin-skinned, pliable, plas
tic, spineless, effeminate ossified three-karat Christianity." Sunday
wanted to kill the idea "that being a Christian takes a man out of the
busy whirl of the world s life and activity and makes him a spineless,
effeminate proposition." He struck a Rooseveltian note in his assertion :
"Moral warfare makes a man hard. Superficial peace makes a man
mushy"; and he summed up his temper when he confessed: "I have no
interest in a God who does not smite." 2

To assess the historical significance of this growing militancy, let us
go back to the earlier history of the evangelical movement.; Sidney E.
Mead has remarked that, after about 1800, "Americans have in effect
been given the hard choice between being intelligent according to the
standards prevailing in their intellectual centers, and being religious
according to the standards prevailing in their denominations." 3 But
this choice was not nearly so clear nor the problem so acute after 1800
as it was after 1860, and particularly after 1900. Up to about 1800 there
was, as Mead himself has pointed out, a kind of informal understand
ing between the pietist and the rationalist mind, based chiefly on a
common philanthropism and on a shared passion for religious liberty.
One thinks, for example, of Benjamin Franklin listening to Whitefield s
preaching in Philadelphia, emptying his pockets for the support of one

1 Very commonly a sexual fundamentalism thoroughgoing in its fear both of
normal sex and of deviation is linked with the other two. One frequently gets
the feeling from later fundamentalist sermons that they were composed for
audiences terrified of their own sexuality. It would be instructive in this respect to
trace the treatment of dancing and prostitution in evangelical literature. Sunday
felt that "the swinging of corners in the square dance brings the position of the
bodies in such attitude that it isn t tolerated in decent society," and proposed a law
preventing children over twelve from attending dancing schools and another
prohibiting dancing xmtil after marriage. McLoughlin: Billy Sunday, pp. 132, 142.

2 McLoughlin: Billy Sunday, pp. 141-2, 175, 179.

8 "Dcnominationalism: the Shape of Protestantism in America," p. 3*4

THE RELIGION OF THE HEART

o the Awakener s favored charities, and, after the regular clergy had
refused their pulpits to Whitefield, contributing to the erection of a
meeting house that would be available to any preacher. This rap
prochement between pietism and rationalism reached a peak at the
time of Jefferson s presidency, when the dissenting groups, notably the
Baptists, gladly threw their support behind a man who, rationalist or
not, stood so firmly for religious freedom. 4

It is true, of course, that in the lygo s, when the influence of Deism
reached its peak in America, there was a great deal of frightened talk
about the incursions of infidelity. These alarms mainly affected the
members of the established denominations whose colleges and defect
ing believers were involved. 5 It is also true that Voltaire and Tom
Paine served as whipping boys for preachers during the revivals that
broke out after 1795. 6 But most early evangelists were far too realistic
to imagine that a learned and intellectually self-conscious skepticism
was a real menace to the simple public they were trying to reach.
They knew that the chief enemy was not rationalism but religious
indifference, that their most important work was not with people who
had been exposed to Tom Paine s assaults on the Bible but with those
who had never been exposed to the Bible. As evangelicals made in
creasingly impressive gains from 1795 to 1835, and as Deism lapsed
into relative quiescence, the battle between pietism and rationalism
fell into the background. There was much more concern among
evangelicals with rescuing the vast American interior from the twin

4 See, for instance, on the Republicanism o New England Baptists, William A.
Robinson: Jeffersonian Democracy in New England (New Haven, 1916)
gp, 128-41.

5 The most vivid account of the hysteria over revolution and infidelity that fol
lowed) the French Revolution is that of Vernon Stauffer in New England and the
Bavarian Illuminati (New York, 1918). Although a gentle variety of philosophical
skepticism was indeed widespread among the American elite at the close of the
eighteenth century, it was mainly a private creed without any bent toward prose
lytizing. After the French Revolution and the rise of Jeffersonian democracy, upper-
class rationalists were less disposed than ever to propagate their rationalism among
the public. A cnisading skeptic like Elihu Palmer, who wanted to unite re
publicanism and skepticism for the middle and lower classes, found it very hard
going, though there were a few Deistic societies in Now York, Philadelphia,
Baltimore, and Newburgh, See G. Adolph Koch: Republican Religion (New
York, 1933).

Catherine C. Cleveland: The Great Revival in the West, z797-3.8os (Chicago,
1916), p. 111. Martin E. Marty, in The Infidel (Cleveland, 1961), argues that
infidelity was much too weak in America to be of grave importance in itself, but
that it became important as a scare word in the orthodox sermon and in theological
recriminations between the religious groups.

The Revolt against Modernity

evils of Romanism and religious apathy than there was with dispel
ling the rather faint afterglow of the Enlightenment.

After the Civil War, all this changed, and rationalism once more took
an important place among the foes of the evangelical mind. The com
ing of Darwinism, with its widespread and pervasive influence upon
every area of thinking, put orthodox Christianity on the defensive;
and the impact of Darwinism was heightened by modern scholarly
Biblical criticism among the learned ministry and among educated
laymen. Finally, toward the end of the century, the problems of indus
trialism and the urban churches gave rise to a widespread movement
for a social gospel, another modernist tendency* Ministers and laymen
alike now had to choose between fundamentalism and modernism;
between conservative Christianity and the social gospel.

As time went on, a great many clerics including a substantial num
ber with evangelical sympathies became liberal. 7 Those who did not
found themselves in the distressing situation of having to live in the
same world with a small minority of rationalist skeptics, and of seeing
constant defections from orthodox Christianity to modernism: from a
Christianity essentially bound up with the timeless problem of salva
tion to one busied with such secular things as labor unions, social set
tlements, and even the promotion of socialism. By the end of the cen
tury it was painfully clear to fundamentalists that they were losing
much of their influence and respectability. One can now discern among
them the emergence of a religious style shaped by a desire to strike
back against everything modern the higher criticism, evolutionism,
the social gospel, rational criticism of any kind. In this union of social
and theological reaction, the foundation was laid for the one hundred
per cent mentality.

The gradual stiffening can be seen in a comparison of Moody and his
most prominent successor. Moody s views were akin to those later
called fundamentalist, but his religious style had already been formed
by the early iS/o s, when the incursions of modernism were still largely
restricted to highbrow circles. His references to the emerging con
flict between fundamentalism and modernism were determined partly
by his personal benignity and partly by the general state of the conflict
itself in his formative years. The Bible is the inspired word of God, he

7 On divergent patterns in the ministry, see Robert S, Michaelson: "The Protes
tant Ministry in America: 1850 to the Present," in H. Richard Niebuhr and
D. D, Williams: op. cit., pp. 250-88.

THE RELIGION OF THE HEART

insisted; there is nothing in it that is not wise, nothing that is not
good, and any attempt to undermine any part of it is the Devil s work.
"If there was one portion of the Scripture untrue, the whole of it went
for nothing." It was still possible simply to dismiss science, and even
rational efforts to interpret the Bible "the Bible was not made to
understand." Talk about figurative language and symbolic meanings
made him impatient. "That s just the way men talk now and just fig
ure away everything." s For all this, there was a notable freedom from
bigotry and militancy in Moody s utterances. He preferred to keep
peace with those religious liberals whom he respected; he was glad to
have them at his Northfield Conferences, and he disliked hearing
them called infidels by other conservatives. It is indicative of the char
acter of his inheritance that of the two educational centers founded
under his auspices, one, the Moody Bible Institute at Chicago, later
became fundamentalist, whereas the other, Northfield Seminary in
Massachusetts, became modernist; both claimed that they were carry
ing on in the spirit of Moody s work.

With Sunday it was quite another matter. He brooked no suggestion
that fundamentalism was not thoroughgoing, impregnable, and tough.
He turned his gift for invective as unsparingly on the higher criticism
and on evolution as on everything else that displeased him. ^There is
a hell and when the Bible says so don t you bo so black-hearted, low-
down, and degenerate as to say you don t believe it, you big fool!"
Again: "Thousands of college graduates are going as fast as they can
straight to hell. If I had a million dollars I d give $999,999 to the church
and $1 to education." "When the word of God says one thing and
scholarship says another, scholarship can go to hell!" 9

The note of petulance became increasingly shrilL The challenge to
orthodoxy had grown too formidable and penetrated too many focal
centers of social power and respectability to be taken lightly. Presuma
bly, the fundamentalists themselves wore afflicted on occasion by
nagging doubts about the adequacy of their faith, which was now be
ing questioned everywhere. As Reinhold Nicbuhr has remarked: "Ex
treme orthodoxy betrays by its very frenzy that the poison of skepti-

McLoughlin: Billij Sunday, pp. 135, 132, 138.

8 Bradford: op. cit., pp. 58-60; McLoughlin: Modern Revivalism, p. 213; on
Moody s pragmatic tolerance, see pp. 2756.

The Revolt against Modernity

cism has entered the soul of the church; for men insist most
vehemently upon their certainties when their hold upon them has been
shaken. Frantic orthodoxy is a method for obscuring doubt." a

The feeling that rationalism and modernism could no longer be an
swered in debate led to frantic efforts to overwhelm them by sheer
violence of rhetoric and finally by efforts at suppression and intimida
tion which reached a climax in the anti-evolution crusade of the
1920*5. The time had come, as Sunday himself asserted in a sermon of
that decade, when "America is not a country for a dissenter to live
in." 2 But unfortunately for the fundamentalists, they had become the
dissenters; they lacked the power to intimidate and suppress their
critics; they were afloat on a receding wave of history. Even within the
large evangelical denominations, they had lost much of their grip.
Large numbers of Methodists, and of Baptists at least in the North,
were themselves taken with religious liberalism. Having lost their
dominance over the main body of evangelicism itself, many fundamen
talists began to feel desperate.

The 1920*5 proved to be the focal decade in the Kulturkampf of
American Protestantism. Advertising, radio, the mass magazines, the
advance of popular education, threw the old mentality into a direct
and unavoidable conflict with the new. The older, rural and small
town America, now fully embattled against the encroachments of mod
ern life, made its most determined stand against cosmopolitanism,
Romanism, and the skepticism and moral experimentalism of the intel
ligentsia. In the Ku Klux Klan movement, the rigid defense of Prohibi
tion, the Scopes evolution trial, and the campaign against Al Smith in
192-8, the older America tried vainly to reassert its authority; but its
only victory was the defeat of Smith, and even that was tarnished by
his success in reshaping the Democratic Party as an urban and cosmo
politan force, a success that laid the groundwork for subsequent Dem
ocratic victories. 3

One can hear in the anguished cries of the 1920*8 a clear awareness
that the older American type was passe, and the accusation that it

1 Docs Civilization Need Religion? (New York, 1927), pp. 2-3. I trust that it
will bo clear to readers that my discussion deals with fundamentalism as a mass
movement and not with the more thoughtful critics of modernism. For an example
of the latter, see J. Grcsham Machen: Christianity and Liberalism (New York,
i<)3). On the intellectual development of fundamentalism, see Stewart G. Cole:
The History of Fundamentalism (New York, 1931).

a McLoughlin: Billy Sunday, p. 378.

a On this aspect of Smith s achievement, see my essay: "Could a Protestant
Have Beaten Hoover in 1928?" The Reporter, Vol. SLZ (March 17, 1960), pp. 313-

THE RELIGION OF THE HEART

was the intelligentsia who were trying to kill it. In 1926 Hiram W.
Evans, the Imperial Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan, wrote a moving es
say on the Klan s purposes, in which he portrayed the major issue of the
time as a struggle between "the great mass of Americans of the old
pioneer stock" and the "intellectually mongrelized Liberals/ " All the
moral and religious values of the "Nordic Americans," he complained,
were being undermined by the ethnic groups that had invaded the
country, and were being openly laughed at by the liberal intellectuals.
"We are a movement," Evans wrote, 4

of the plain people, very weak in the matter of culture, intellec
tual support, and trained leadership. We are demanding, and we
expect to win, a return of power into the hands of the everyday,
not highly cultured, not overly intellectualized, but entirely un
spoiled and not de-Americanized, average citizen of the old stock.
Our members and leaders are all of this class the opposition of
the intellectuals and liberals who hold the leadership, betrayed
Americanism, and from whom we expect to wrest control, is al
most automatic.

This is undoubtedly a weakness. It lays us open to the charge of
being "hicks" and "rubes" and "drivers of second-hand Fords." We
admit it. Far worse, it makes it hard for us to state our case and
advocate our crusade in the most effective way, for most of us lack
skill in language. . . .

Every popular movement has suffered from just this handi
cap. . . .

The Klan does not believe that the fact that it is emotional and
instinctive, rather than coldly intellectual, is a weakness. All ac-

4 "The Klan s Fight for Americanism," North American Review, Vol. CCXXIII
( March- April-May, 1926), pp. 38 fF. Cf. Gerald L. K. Smith in 1943: "Our people
frequently do not express themselves because there are only a few of us who speak
with abandon in times like this, but in the hearts of our people are pent-up emo
tions which go unexpressed because they fear their vocabularies are insufficient."
Leo Lowenthal and Norbert Guterman: Prophets of Deceit (New York, 1949),
p. no.

This feeling that the American public is sound at heart but that spokesmen of
the old American values somehow lack the means to compete with the smart-
alecks of modernism runs through the utterances of the right wing. Gf. Senator
Barry Goldwater in The Conscience of a Conservative (New York, 1960),
pp. 45: "Our failure ... is the failure of the Conservative demonstration.
Though we Conservatives . . . feel sure that the country agrees with us, we seem
unable to demonstrate the practical relevance of Conservative principles to the
needs of the day. . . . Perhaps we suffer from an over-sensitivity to the judgments
of those who rule the mass communications media. We are daily consigned by
enlightened commentators to political oblivion."

Revolt against Modernity

tion comes from emotion, rather than from ratiocination. Our emo
tions and the instincts on which they are based have been bred
into us for thousands of years; far longer than reason has had a
place in the human brain. . . . They are the foundations of our
American civilization, even more than our great historic docu
ments; they can be trusted where the fine-haired reasoning of the
denatured intellectuals cannot.

This is not an altogether irrelevant statement of the case, and not
immoderate in tone. The difficulty was to find any but immoderate
means of putting it into action. On this count, the shabby history of the
Klan speaks eloquently. So does the panic of the fundamentalists. The
Georgia assemblyman who said:

Read the Bible. It teaches you how to act. Read the hymn-
book. It contains the finest poetry ever written. Read the almanac.
It shows you how to figure out what the weather will be. There
isn t another book that it is necessary for anyone to read, and
therefore I am opposed to all libraries.

may seem too obscure to be worth notice; but one can hardly say the
same of a former Secretary of State and three-time candidate for the
presidency who could proclaim, as Bryan did in a speech before
Seventh-Day Adventists in 1924: "All the ills from which America
suffers can be traced back to the teaching of evolution. It would be
better to destroy every other book ever written, and save just the first
three verses of Genesis." 5

It was in the crusade against the teaching of evolution that the
fundamentalist movement reached its climax and in the Scopes trial
that it made its most determined stand. The trial afforded a perfect
dramatization of everything at stake in the confrontation of the funda
mentalist and the modernist mind. That the issue centered over the
place of evolution in the public high school was itself evidence of the
degree to which modernism had been brought down from the level of
elite consciousness and made a part of popular experience. The battle
over evolution in education had been fought out once before, in the
colleges and universities, where conservative clergymen had tried

* Bolh quotations are in Maynard Shipley: The War on Modern Science (New
York, XQ27), pp. 330, 254-5, Such remarks are in the main tradition of evangelical
ism, but they reflect its increasing shrillness in this period. Cf. the milder expression
(if the pro-Civil War Methodist preacher, James B. Finley: "I have wondered if the
grout multiplication of books has not had a deleterious tendency, in diverting the
mind from the Bible." Autobiography (Cincinnati, 1854), P- 17*-

THE RELIGION OF THE HEART 126

during the three decades after 1860 to stem the tide of Darwinism. But
there it had taken place at the elite level, and the inevitable losses
sustained by the anti-evolutionists did not touch the vitals of the
fundamentalists. Few of the true believers, after all> then attended
college, and those who did could still seek out the backwater schools
that had been kept pure from the infections of The Origin of Species.
By the ig^o s, however, the teaching of evolution, moving down the
educational ladder, had overtaken high schools, and the high schools
had begun to reach the people. In the fifteen years before the First
World War, the number of high schools had more than doubled, and
this growth continued apace after the war. The high-school diploma
was clearly becoming the point to which vast numbers of American
children would be educated the point to which they must be edu
cated if they were to be equipped for the scramble for success. Masses
of pious and aspiring Americans were now beginning to feel that their
children ought to go to high school, and to realize that they were all but
certain to be menaced there by evolutionism. It was over the use of
an evolutionist textbook, George Hunter s Civic Biology, that John T.
Scopes came to trial in Tennessee. This book had been adopted by the
state textbook commission in 1919 and had been in use in schools of the
state as far back as 1909, fifteen years before it was found dangerous.
To the fundamentalists of Tennessee and elsewhere, the effort to
stop the teaching of evolution represented an effort to save the religion
of their children indeed, to save all the family pieties from the
ravages of the evolutionists, the intellectuals, the cosmopolitan^. 6 If the
fundamentalists deserve any sympathy and I think they do it must
be on this count. A good deal of their ferocity is understandable if one
realizes that they saw (and still see) the controversy as a defense of
their homes and families. John Washington Butler., the Primitive
Baptist Tennessee legislator who introduced the law against the teach
ing of evolution in that state, did so because he had heard of a young
woman in his own community who had gone to a university and re
turned an evolutionist. This set him to worrying about what would

greatest menace to the public school system today is ... its Godless-
ness," Bryan remarked in The Commoner, February, 1920, p. 11. Bryan was
disturbed by the reports he kept receiving from parents throughout the country
that the state schools were undermining the faith of their children. Memoirs
(Chicago, 1925 ), p. 459. On this theme in the anti-evolutionist literature, see
Norman F. Furniss: The Fundamentalist Controversy, 1918-1931 (New Haven,
1954), pp. 44~5-

The Revolt against Modernity

happen to his own five children, and led at last to his success in 1925 in
getting his wishes enacted into law in his state. "Save our children for
God!" cried a member of the Tennessee Senate in the debate on
Butler s bill. When Clarence Darrow said at Scopes s trial that "every
child ought to be more intelligent than his parents," he was raising the
specter that frightened the fundamentalists most. This was precisely
what they did not want, if being more intelligent meant that children
were expected to abandon parental ideas and desert parental ways.
"Why, my friend," said William Jennings Bryan during the trial, "if
they believe [evolution], they go back to scoff at the religion of their
parents. And the parents have a right to say that no teacher paid by
their money shall rob their children of faith in God and send them
back to their homes, skeptical, infidels, or agnostics, or atheists." "Our
purpose and our only purpose," he announced before the trial began,
"is to vindicate the right of parents to guard the religion of their
children. . . ." 7 To Bryan and his followers it was patent that Darrow
was trying to pull apart the skeins of religion and family loyalties.
"Damn you," said one Tennessean, shaking his fist under D arrow s
nose, "don t you reflect on my mother s Bible. If you do I will tear you
to pieces/ 8 ,

fit was appropriate that the national leadership of the anti-evolution
crusade should have fallen to Bryan, a layman who combined in his
person the two basic ancestral pieties of the people evangelical faith
and populistic democracy. In his mind, faith and democracy con
verged in a common anti-intellectualist rationale. On one side were
the voices of the people and the truths of the heart; on the other were
the intellectuals, a small arrogant elite given over to false science and
mechanical rationalism variously described by him as a "scientific
soviet" and a "little irresponsible oligarchy of self-styled intellec
tuals/ " Religion, he pointed out, had never belonged exclusively to an
elite: "Christianity is intended for all, not for the so-called thinkers
only." Mind, being mechanical, needs the heart to direct it. Mind can
plan the commission of crimes as well as deeds for the benefit of

7 Leslie H, Allen, eel.: Bryan and Darrow at Dayton (New York, 1925), p 70;
this work is edited from the trial record and other sources.

8 Italics added here; see Ray Ginger s excellent study of the Scopes trial: Six
Datf$ or Forever? (Boston, 1958), pp. 2,, 17, 64, 134, 381, 206.

^Ginger: op. cit., pp. 40, 181; cf. Bryan s Famous Figures of the Old Testa
ment, p. 195; Stfucn Questions in Dispute* pp. 78, 154; In His Image (New York,
), pp. 200-2; The Commoner, August, 1921, p. 3; November, 1922, p. 3.

THE RELIGION OF THE HEART 128

society. "Mind worship is the great sin in the intellectual world today."
Only the heart which is the province of religion can bring discipline
to the things of the mind so that they work for good.

* Here is the crux of the matter: the juncture between populistic
democracy and old-fashioned religion! Since the affairs of the heart are
the affairs of the common man, and since the common man s intuition
in such matters is as good as indeed better than that of the intel
lectuals, his judgment in matters of religion should rule. Where there
appeared to be a conflict between religion and science, it was the
public, Bryan believed, and not "those who measure men by diplomas
and college degrees," who should decide. As Walter Lippmann ob
served, the religious doctrine that all men will at last stand equal
before the throne of God was somehow transmuted in Bryan s mind
into the idea that all men were equally good biologists before the ballot
box of Tennessee. In effect, Bryan proposed to put the question of
evolution to the vote of Christians, and the issue was metamorphosed
into a question of the rights of the majority. 1

The Bible condemns evolution, theistic evolution as well as ma
terialistic evolution, if we can trust the judgment of Christians as
to what the Bible means. Not one in ten of those who accept the
Bible as the Word of God have ever believed in the evolutionary
hypothesis as applied to man. Unless there is some rule by which
a small fraction can compel the substitution of their views for the
views entertained by the masses, evolution must stand condemned
as contrary to the revealed will of God.

In Bryan s mind the question of the teaching of evolution in the
schools was a challenge to popular democracy. "What right have the
evolutionists a relatively small percentage of the population to

1 Bryan: Orthodox Christianity versus Modernism (New York, 19^3), pp. 14,
26, 2930, 32, 42; cf. Ginger: op. cit,, pp. 35, 40, 181. "The one beauty about the
word of God," said Bryan, "is that it does not take an expert to understand it."
When some metropolitan newspapers suggested that a jury of Dayton residents
might not be competent to pass on the issues at stake, Bryan commented: "Accord
ing to our system of government, the people are interested in everything and can be
trusted to decide everything, and so with our juries/" As he saw it, the case raised
the question, "can a minority use the courts to force its ideas on the schools?" In
this controversy, poor Bryan, so long starved for victory, made another of his great
miscalculations. He appears to have expected to win. "For the first time in my life/
he told a fundamentalist conference, "I m on the side of the majority." Ginger: op.
cit., pp. 44, go. For an astute contemporary statement on the relation between
Bryan s version of democracy, his evangelical sympathies, and his anti-intellectual-
ism, see John Dewey: "The American Intellectual Frontier/* New Republic, Vol.
XXX (May 10, 1922), pp. 303-5.

129 The Revolt against Modernity

teach at public expense a so-called scientific interpretation of the
Bible when orthodox Christians are not permitted to teach an orthodox
interpretation of the Bible?" Bryan was not convinced, in any case,
that the science of the evolutionists was sound; but even so, he said,
they ignored "the science of government/ in which "rights are de
termined by the majority except for those rights safeguarded to the
minority by the Constitution. To prevent the minority from teaching
their doctrines in the public schools would not infringe on their rights.
"They have no right to demand pay for teaching that which the parents
and the taxpayers do not want taught. The hand that writes the pay
check rules the school." Christians had to build their own schools and
colleges in which to teach Christianity. "Why should not atheists and
agnostics be required to build their own schools and colleges in which
to teach their doctrines?" 2 So, if Bryan had had his way, the public
schools would have banned evolutionary biology altogether, and the
teaching of modern science would have been confined to a small num
ber of secularist private schools. This would have been a catastrophe
for American education, but Bryan, who saw no contradiction between
sound education and orthodox faith, knew what the choice must be, if
it had to be made. An educated man without religion is a ship without
a pilot. "If we have to give up either religion or education, we should
give up education." 3

. 3

Today the evolution controversy seems as remote as the Homeric era
to intellectuals in the East, and it is not uncommon to take a con
descending view of both sides. In other parts of the country and in
other circles, the controversy is still alive. A few years ago, when the
Scopes trial was dramatized in Inherit the Wind, the play seemed on
Broadway more like a quaint period piece than a stirring call for free
dom of thought. But when the road company took the play to a small
town in Montana, a member of the audience rose and shouted
"AmenI" at one of the speeches of the character representing Bryan.
Today intellectuals have bogies much more frightening than funda
mentalism in the schools; but it would be a serious failure of imagina
tion not to remember how scared the intellectuals of the 1920*8 were.
Perhaps not quite so much appeared to be at stake as in the McCarthy-

2 Orthodox Christianity versus Modernism, pp. 29, 45-6; cf. "Darwinism in
Public Schools/ The Commoner, January, 1923, pp.

3 Ginger: op, cit., p. 88.

THE RELIGION OF THE HEART 130

ist crusade of the 1950*5, but the sense of oppressive danger was no less
real. One need only read Maynard Shipley s contemporary survey of
the anti-evolution movement, The War on Modern Science, to recap
ture a sense of the genuine alarm of the intellectuals. The Scopes trial,
like the Army-McCarthy hearings thirty years later, brought feeling to
a head and provided a dramatic purgation and resolution. After the
trial was over, it was easier to see that the anti-evolution crusade was
being contained and that the fears of the intellectuals had been
excessive. But before the trial, the crusade had gained a great deal of
strength in. many states, including several outside the South. In the
South, as W. J. Cash, who observed it at first hand, remarked, it was,
like the Klan, an authentic folk movement, which had the "active sup
port and sympathy of the overwhelming majority of the Southern
people," not only among the masses but among influential lay and
clerical leaders. 4 If the highbrows had nothing to fear for themselves in
their more secure centers of learning, they could fear with some reason
that the country s system of secondary education might be ruined. Nor
did they altogether have their way in its defense. To this day, the
language of most secondary-school biology texts is guarded, and evolu
tion is taught in many places only by indirection. Just a few years ago,
in a poll of representative adolescent opinion throughout the country,
only about a third of the sample responded affirmatively to the state
ment: "Man was evolved from lower forms of animals." 5

The evolution controversy and the Scopes trial greatly quickened
the pulse of anti-intellectualism. For the first time in the twentieth
century, intellectuals and experts were denounced as enemies by
leaders of a large segment of the public. No doubt, the militant
fundamentalists were a minority in the country, but they were a sub
stantial minority; and their animus plainly reflected the feelings of
still larger numbers, who, however reluctant to join in their reactionary
crusade, none the less shared their disquiet about the trend of the
times, their fear of the cosmopolitan mentality, of critical intelligence,
of experimentalism in morals and literature.1 Bryan s full-throated as-

4 W. J. Cash: The Mind of the South ( New York, 1941 ) , pp. 337-8.

5 In this poll, 40 per cent checked "No," 35 per cent Yes," and 2,4 per cent
"Don t know." H. H. Remmers and D. H. Radler: The American Teenager (Indi
anapolis, 1957). Cf. the pressures against the teaching of evolution in the 1930*5 as
reported by Howard K. Beale in Are American Teachers Free? (New York, 1936),
pp. 296-7.

6 This concern with morals might bear further examination. As fundamentalists
saw it, the loss of faith among their children would be only the preliminary to a
loss of morals. They had a good deal to say about the "sensuality inherent in the

131 The Revolt against Modernity

saults upon the "experts" were symbolic of the sharply deviating paths
being taken by the two sides. It had not always been so. In the Pro
gressive era the intellectuals had felt themselves to be essentially in
harmony with the basic interests and aspirations of the people. Now it
was evident once more that this harmony was neither pre-established
nor guaranteed. >The more spiritually earnest the great religious public
was, the more Violently it might differ from the views of the majority of
intellectuals. As for the fundamentalists, it would be a mistake to for
get that being routed in the main contest did not cause them to
capitulate or disappear. They retired sullenly, some of them looking
for other spheres in which modernists might be more vulnerable. They
could not eclipse modernism or secularism in the religious controversy
itself, but they might find other areas in which to rise and smite again.
The events of the Great Depression gave them scant comfort. Their
theological isolation from the main body of the big evangelical
churches was doubly oppressive, for the evangelicals in overwhelming
numbers now became politically liberal or left. 7 However, the laymen
did not go so far as the clergy, and many conservative laymen felt that
the development of a new social-gospel movement had created a new
"priestly class** (as one right- wing churchman put it) out of harmony
with the sentiments of many people in their congregations. Their
heightened sense of isolation and impotence helped to bring many of
the dwindling but still numerically significant fundamentalists into the
ranks of a fanatical right-wing opposition to the New Deal. The funda
mentalism of the cross was now supplemented by a fundamentalism of
the flag. Since the 1930*5, fundamentalism has been a significant
component in the extreme right in American politics, whose cast of
thought often shows strong fundamentalist filiations. 8 The spokesmen

notion that man has descended from lower forms of life, and their rhetoric sug
gests to what a degree sexual fears, as well as others, were mobilized in this
controversy.

7 I am indebted here to two excellent studies of the social crosscurrents in Ameri
can religion: Paul Carter s The Decline and Revival of the Social Gospel (Ithaca,
1954) and Robert Moats Miller s American Protestantism and Social Issues
( Chapel Hill, 1958).

8 The several authors, including myself, of the essays assessing The New Ameri
can Right (New York, 1955), ed. by Daniel Bell, have either ignored or given
only casual attention to the place of fundamentalism in right-wing extremism. But
see some of the more recent essays in the new edition, The Radical Right (New
York, 1963). The most informative work on the subject is Ralph Lord Roy s Apos
tles of Discord (Boston, 1953), which is written in a mood of muckraking and ex
posure but has an extensive scholarly documentation. On recent developments, see
David Danzig: "The Radical Ri^ht and the Rise of the Fundamentalist Minority,"
Commentary f Vol. XXXI11 ( April, 1962), pp. 291-8.

THE RELIGION OF THE HEART 132

of this trend in political fundamentalism have kept alive the folkish
anti-intellectualism of the evolution controversy. "I do not understand
political science, as an authority from an academic viewpoint/* one of
their leaders proclaimed. "I am not familiar with the artistic master
pieces of Europe, but I do say this tonight: I understand the hearts of
the American people/ And he went on to denounce their betrayers:
"The Scribes and Pharisees of the Twentieth Century . . . [who]
provide a nation with its dominant propaganda, including seasonal
fashions in politics, religious attitudes, sub-standard ethics and half-
caste morals." It is an ancient and indigenous refrain, echoed in the
simplest terms by another : **We are going to take this government out
of the hands of these city-slickers and give it back to the people that
still believe two plus two is four, God is in his Heaven, and the Bible is
the Word" 9

Although no one has ever tried to trace in detail the historic links be
tween the radical right of the depression and post-depression periods
and the fundamentalism of the ig^o s, there are some suggestive con
tinuities among the leaders. Many of the leaders of right-wing groups
have been preachers, or ex-preachers, or sons of preachers with rigid
religious upbringings. Some of the men associated with Billy Sunday in
the mid-thirties later turned up as right-wing or quasi-fascist agitators.
Gerald Winrod of Kansas, one of the most prominent right-wing
prophets of our time, began his career of agitation as a crusading anti-
evolutionist. Another, Gerald L. K. Smith, was a minister s son and a
preacher for the Disciples of Christ. The late J. Frank Norris^ a
Southern Baptist preacher in the forefront of the anti-evolution
crusade in Texas, later became one of the most colorful right-wing
messiahs. Carl Mclntire,ia leading organizer of contemporary right-
wing opposition to modernism, was originally a prot<g6 of the high
brow fundamentalist^ J. Gresham Machen.^The more recent resur
gence of the right wing in the John Birch Society and various
"Christian Crusades" has made the fundamentalist orientation of a
large segment of the right wing more conspicuous than at any time in
the past; the movement has been led, to a great extent, by preachers

9 Leo Lowenthal and Norbert Guterman; Prophets of Deceit (New York, 1949),
pp. 109-10; the quotations are from Gerald L. K, Smith and Charles B. Hudson.

1 On Winrod, Smith, Norris, and Mclntire, see Roy: op. cit., passim; Carter:
op. cit., chapter 4; Miller: op. cit., chapter 11; and^McLoughlinj Billy Sunday,
pp. 290, 310. On fundamentalism and the John Birch Society, see The New York
Times, April 23 and October zg, 1961; Tris Coffin: "The Yahoo Returns," New
Leader, April 17, 1961.

133 The Revolt against Modernity

and ex-preachers. The literature of the extreme right also shows a
significant continuity in style indicative of the degree to which the
pattern of fundamentalism has become the pattern of militant na
tionalism. (It was with an appropriate sense of this continuity that
Gerald L. K. Smith named his paper The Cross and the Flag.)

It is not mere opportunism that causes the politically minded
fundamentalist to gravitate toward the far right. No less than others,
fundamentalists like to feel that they have a comprehensive world
view, and their minds are more satisfied when religious and political
antipathies can be linked together. {They have developed a gift for
combining seemingly irrelevant animosities so as to make them mu
tually re~enforcing.\For example, just as contemporary fundamentalists
have linked their religious sentiments to the cold war, the fundamen
talists of the twenties responded to the issues of the First World War
and to residual anti-German feeling. It was one of their most common
arguments against the modernists that higher criticism of the Bible has
received its strongest impetus from German scholarship; they were
thus able to forge a link between the German amorality supposedly
revealed by wartime atrocity stories and the destructive moral effects
of Biblical criticism. This case was argued at various levels of sophisti
cation, perhaps most simply and informally by Billy Sunday: "In
1895 at the Potsdam Palace the Kaiser called his statesmen together
and outlined his plan for world domination, and he was told that the
German people would never stand by and endorse it, as it was not in
line with the teaching of Martin Luther. Then the Kaiser cried, *We
will change the religion of Germany then/ and higher criticism
began." 2

There seems to be such a thing as the generically prejudiced mind.
Studies of political intolerance and ethnic prejudice have shown that
zealous church-going and rigid religious faith are among the important
correlates of political and ethnic animosity. 3 It is the existence of this

2 McLoxtghlin: Billy Sunday, p. 281.

8 The* most interesting work I know of on the generically prejudiced mind is
that of E. L. Hartley, who asked college students to rate various nations and races
according to their acceptability. He had in his list the names of three fictitious
ethnic groups, the Daniereans., Pireneans, and Wallonians. There was a high
correlation between expressed prejudice against actual ethnic groups and prejudice
against those fictitious ones, bespeaking a set of mind that is prepared to react with
u oorluin hostility to anything. See E. L. Hartley: Problems in Prejudice (New
York, 1946), On the relation between religious orthodoxy and forms of intolerance,
sec Samuel A. Stouffei: Communism, Conformity, and Civil Liberties (New York,
1955), pp. 140-55; and T. A. Adorno et al.: The Authoritarian Personality (New
York, 1950), chapters 6 and 18.

THE RELIGION OF THE HEART 134

type of mind that sets the stage for the emergence of the one-hundred
percenter and determines the similarity of style between the modern
right wing and the fundamentalist^ In fact, the conditions of the
cold Avar and the militant spirit bred by the constant struggle against
world Communism have given the fundamentalist mind a new lease
on life J Like almost everything else in our world, fundamentalism
itself has been considerably secularized, and this process of seculariza
tion has yielded a type of pseudo-political mentality whose way of
thought is best understood against the historical background of the
revivalist preacher and the camp meeting. The fundamentalist mind
has had the bitter experience of being routed in the field of morals
and censorship, on evolution and Prohibition, and it finds itself in
creasingly submerged in a world in which the great and respectable
media of mass communication violate its sensibilities and otherwise
ignore it. In a modern, experimental, and "sophisticated" society, it has
been elbowed aside and made a figure of fun, and even much of the
religious "revival" of our time is genteel and soft-spoken in a way that
could never have satisfied the old-fashioned fundamentalist zeal. JBut
in politics, the secularized fundamentalism of our time has found a
new kind of force and a new punitive capacity. The political climate
of the post-war era has given the fundamentalist type powerful new
allies among other one-hundred percenters: rich men, some of them
still loyal to a fundamentalist upbringing, stung by the income tax and
still militant against the social reforms of the New Deal; isolationist
groups and militant nationalists; Catholic fundamentalists, ready for
the first time to unite with their former persecutors on the issue of
"Godless Communism"; and Southern reactionaries newly animated
by the fight over desegregation.)

| One reason why the political intelligence of our time is so in
credulous and uncomprehending in the presence of the right-wing
mind is that it does not reckon fully with the essentially theological
concern that underlies right-wing views of the world. Characteristi
cally, the political intelligence, if it is to operate at all as a kind of civic
force rather than as a mere set of maneuvers to advance this or that
special interest, must have its own way of handling the facts of life and
of forming strategies. It accepts conflict as a central and enduring
reality and understands human society as a form o equipoise based
upon the continuing process of compromise. It shuns ultimate show
downs and looks upon the ideal of total partisan victory as unattain
able, as merely another variety of threat to the kind of balance with

135 The Revolt against Modernity

which it is familiar. It is sensitive to nuances and sees things in
degrees. It is essentially relativist and skeptical, but at the same time
circumspect and humane.^

The fundamentalist mind will have nothing to do with all this: it is
essentially Manichean; it looks upon the world as an arena for conflict
between absolute good and absolute evil, and accordingly it scorns
compromises (who would compromise with Satan?) and can tolerate
no ambiguities. It cannot find serious importance in what it believes to
be trifling degrees of difference: liberals support measures that are for
all practical purposes socialistic, and socialism is nothing more than a
variant of Communism, which, as everyone knows, is atheism. Whereas
the distinctively political intelligence begins with the political world,
and attempts to make an assessment of how far a given set of goals
can in fact be realized in the face of a certain balance of opposing
forces, the secularized fundamentalist mind begins with a definition of
that which is absolutely right, and looks upon politics as an arena in
which that right must be realized. It cannot think, for example, of
the cold war as a question of mundane politics that is to say, as a con
flict between two systems of power that are compelled in some degree
to accommodate each other in order to survive but only as a clash
of faiths. It is not concerned with the realities of power with the fact,
say, that the Soviets have the bomb but with the spiritual battle with
the Communist, preferably the domestic Communist, whose reality
does not consist in what he does, or even in the fact that he exists, but
who represents, rather, an archetypal opponent in a spiritual wrestling
match. He has not one whit less reality because the fundamentalists
have never met him in the flesh. t

The issues of the actual world are hence transformed into a spiritual
Armageddon, an ultimate reality, in which any reference to day -by-day
actualities has the character of an allegorical illustration, and not of the
empirical evidence that ordinary men offer for ordinary conclusions.
Thus, when a right-wing leader accuses Dwight D. Eisenhower of
being a conscious, dedicated agent of the international Communist
conspiracy, he may seem demented, by the usual criteria of the politi
cal intelligence; but, more accurately, I believe, he is quite literally out
of this world. What he is trying to account for is not Eisenhower s
actual political behavior, as men commonly understand it, but Eisen
hower s place, as a kind of fallen angel, in the realm of ultimate moral
and spiritual values, which to him has infinitely greater reality than
mundane politics. Scon in this light, the accusation is no longer quite

THE RELIGION OF THE HEART 136

so willfully perverse, but appears in its proper character as a kind of
sublime nonsense. Credo quia absurdum est.

4

A NOTE ON AMERICAN CATHOLICISM

In these pages I have been mainly concerned with the relationship
between Protestant evangelicism and American anti-intellectualism,
simply because America has been a Protestant country, molded by
Protestant institutions. It would be a mistake, however, to fail to note
the distinctive ethos of American Catholicism, which has contributed
in a forceful and decisive way to our anti-intellectualism. Catholicism
in this country over the past two or three generations has waxed strong
in numbers, in political power, and in acceptance. At the middle of
the nineteenth century it was, though a minority faith, the largest
single church in the country and was steadily gaining ground despite
anti-Catholic sentiment. Today the Church claims almost a fourth of
the population, and has achieved an acceptance which would have
seemed surprising even thirty years ago.

One might have expected Catholicism to add a distinctive leaven to
the intellectual dialogue in America, bringing as it did a different sense
of the past and of the world, a different awareness of the human condi
tion and of the imperatives of institutions. In fact, it has done nothing
of the kind, for it has failed to develop an intellectual tradition in
America or to produce its own class of intellectuals capable cither of
exercising authority among Catholics or of mediating between the
Catholic mind and the secular or Protestant mind. Instead, American
Catholicism has devoted itself alternately to denouncing the aspects of
American life it could not approve and imitating more acceptable
aspects in order to surmount its minority complex and "Americanize"
itself. In consequence, the American Church, which contains more
communicants than that of any country except Brazil and Italy, and is
the richest and perhaps the best organised of the national divisions of
the Church, lacks an intellectual culture. "In no Western society/
D. W. Brogan has remarked, "is the intellectual prestige of Catholicism
lower than in the country whez^e, in such respects as wealth, numbers,
and strength of organization, it is so powerful/ In the last two
decades, which have seen a notable growth of the Catholic middle

137 The Revolt against Modernity

class and the cultivated Catholic public, Catholic leaders have become
aware of this failure; a few years ago, Monsignor John Tracy Ellis s
penetrating brief survey of American Catholic intellectual impoverish
ment had an overwhelmingly favorable reception in the Catholic
press. 4 j

Two formative circumstances in the development of early Ameri
can Catholicism made for indifference to intellectual life. First in im
portance was the fiercely prejudiced Know-Nothing psychology
against which it had to make its way in the nineteenth century. Re
garded as a foreign body that ought to be expelled from the national
organism > and as the agent of an alien power, the Church had to fight
to establish its Americanism. Catholic laymen who took pride in their
religious identity responded to the American milieu with militant
self-assertion whenever they could, and(" Church spokesmen seemed to
feel that it was not scholarship but vigorous polemicism which was
needed, ^/The Church thus took on a militant stance that ill accorded
with reflection; and in our time, when the initial prejudice against it
has been largely surmounted, its members persist in what Monsignor
Ellis calls a "self-imposed ghetto mentality."} A second determining
factor was that for a long time the limited resources of the American
Church were pre-empted by the exigent task of creating the institu
tions necessary to absorb a vast influx of immigrants almost ten
million between 1820 and 1920 and to provide them with the rudi
ments of religious instruction. So much was taken up by this pressing
practical need that little was left over for the higher culture, in so far as
there were members of the Church who were concerned with Catholic
culture. ;

* These paragraphs owe much, to Monsignor Ellis s article, "American Catholics
and the Intellectual Life/* Thought, Vol. XXX (Autumn, 1955), pp. 351-88, In
formation and quotations not otherwise identified are taken from this essay. See
also, among Catholic writers, the discussions of related issues in Thomas F.
O Dca: American Catholic Dilemma: An Inquiry Into Intellectual Life (New
York, 1958); and Father Walter J. Ong, S. J.: Frontiers in American Catholicism
(New York, 1957); and, among non-Catholic writers, Robert D. Cross: Liberal
Catholicism in America (Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1958), which examines at
length sonic of the tensions within the Church caused by adaptation to America.

K As Father Ong (op. cit., p. 38) points out, it is all but impossible for American
Catholics to understand "how this evident devotion [of educated French Catholics]
can bo nurtured in the twentieth century without courses in apologetics of the sort
which American Catholic Colleges and universities feature but which are quite
unknown at the Institut Catholique (Catholic University faculty) in Paris,
Toulouse, or elsewhere. American Catholics are lost when they find that the French
apologetic tends to train the youthful mind to think through modern problems in
Catholic ways. . . ."

THE RELIGION OF THE HEART 138

i Catholicism was, moreover, the religion of the immigrant. 6 To Ameri
can Catholics, the true Church seemed to be in Europe; and they -were
content to leave the cultivation of intellectual life to the more
sophisticated Europeans all the while developing an exaggerated
and unwarranted deference to such Catholic writers as Belloc and
Chesterton. Non-English-speaking immigrants showed a high degree of
passivity before clerical leadership, as well as before American society
as a whole. What is perhaps most important though it receives less
than its proper share of attention from Catholic analysts of the
Church s cultural problems here is the fact that the Irish became the
primary catalysts between America and the other immigrant groups.
The Irish, taking advantage of their knowledge of English and their
prior arrival, constructed the network of political machines and Church
hierarchy through which most Catholic arrivals could make a place for
themselves in American life. And more than any other group, the Irish
put their stamp on American Catholicism; consequently the American
Church absorbed little of the impressive scholarship of German Ca
tholicism or the questioning intellectualism of the French Church,
and much more of the harsh Puritanism and fierce militancy of the
Irish clergy.

Cut off by language and class from easy entrance into the main
stream of Protestant Anglo-Saxon culture, immigrant working-class
Catholics were in no position to produce intellectual spokesmen. It is
significant that many of the intellectual leaders of the Church in
America were not, in national origin, typical of the mass of American
Catholics, but were rather native Anglo-Americans converted to the
Church^ like Orestes Brownson and Father Isaac Hecker. The social
origins and cultural opportunities of Church officials were well charac
terized by Archbishop Gushing in 1947 when he said that "in all the
American hierarchy, resident in the United States, there is not known

6 The immigrant character of the Church brings into focus a problem that has
existed for all immigrant faiths and indeed for all upwardly mobile American
groups, Protestant or Catholic, immigrant or native. It is that the process of educa
tion, instead of becoming a reinforcing bond between generations, constitutes an
additional barrier between them and adds greatly to the poignance of parenthood.
Within a stable social class, attendance at the same schools can often provide a
unifying set of experiences for parents and children. But in a country in which
millions of children of almost illiterate parents have gone to high school and
millions more whose parents have only modest educations have gone to college,
the process of education is as much a threat to parents as a promise. This has added
force to the desire to put, so to speak, a ceiling on the quality and range of educa
tion/Parents often hope to give their children the social and vocational advantages
of college without at the same time infusing in them cultural aspirations too remote
from those of the home environment in which they have been reared, j

139 The Revolt against Modernity

to me one Bishop, Archbishop or Cardinal whose father or mother was
a college graduate. Every one of our Bishops and Archbishops is the
son of a working man and a working man s wife." The hierarchy,
which has been drawn from this culturally underprivileged back
ground, is of course educated, but primarily in a vocational way. As
Bishop Spalding pointed out at the Third Plenary Council of Balti
more: "the ecclesiastical seminary is not a school of intellectual cul
ture, either here in America or elsewhere, and to imagine that it can
become the instrument of intellectual culture is to cherish a delusion/*
So, even in this most ancient of Christian churches, the American
environment has prevailed and the American problem has reasserted
itself in an acute form: culturally one began de nouo. So lacking in
scholarly distinction were American Catholics that when the Catholic
University of America was opened by the American hierarchy in
1889, with the hope of remedying this situation, six of its original eight-
man faculty had to be recruited from Europe, and the two native mem
bers were converts who had been educated outside the folds of the
Church.

For a long time the proportion of lay Catholics wealthy enough to
give significant patronage to intellectual institutions was small, as
compared with other faiths. The emergence of the modern Catholic
millionaire has not changed this situation as much as it might have
done. Monsignor Ellis remarks, concerning one case in point, that the
Catholic University of America received, during the first sixty-six years
of its existence, only about ten bequests of $100,000 or more, and only
one of these approached the kind of munificence that has made the
American private secular university possible. With the increasing
upward mobility of a large part of the Catholic population, Catholics,
like Protestants, have sent their children to colleges in growing num
bers. But both Catholic educators and non-Catholic friends like
Robert M. Hutchins have been dismayed to see Catholic schools
commonly reproducing the vocationalism, athleticism, and anti-
intcllcctualism which prevails so widely in American higher education
as a whole. The intellectual achievement of Catholic colleges and
universities remains startlingly low, both in the sciences and in the
hxunanities. Robert H. Knapp and his collaborators, surveying the
collegiate origins of American scientists in 195^, remarked that
Catholic institutions are "among the least productive of all institutions
and constitute a singularly unproductive sample." Their record in the
humanities, surprisingly, is worse: "Catholic institutions, though ex-

THE RELIGION OF THE HEART 140

ceptionally unproductive in all areas of scholarship, achieve their best
record in the sciences." 7

As one might have expected, the way of the Catholic intellectual in
this country has been doubly hard. He has had to justify himself not
only as a Catholic to the Protestant and secular intellectual community
but also as an intellectual to fellow Catholics, for whom his vocation is
even more questionable than it is to the American community at large.
Catholic scholars and writers tend to be recognized belatedly by their
co-religionists, when they are recognized at all. 8

All of this concerns, of course, not so much the anti-intellectualism
of American Catholicism as its cultural impoverishment, its non-
intellectualism. But it will serve as background for a more central
point: a great many Catholics have been as responsive as Protestant
fundamentalists to that revolt against modernity of which I have
spoken, and they have done perhaps more than their share in de
veloping the one-hundred per cent mentality. In no small measure this
has been true because their intellectual spokesmen who are now
growing in numbers and influence have not yet gained enough
authority in the Catholic community to hold in check the most
retrograde aspects of that revolt, including its general suspicion of
mind and its hostility to intellectuals. A great deal of the energy of the
priesthood in our time has been directed toward censorship, divorce,
birth control, and other issues which have brought the Church into
conflict with the secular and the Protestant mind time and again; some
of it has also gone into ultra-conservative political movements, which
are implacable enemies of the intellectual community. Catholic
intellectuals on the whole have opposed the extreme and (from the
point of view of the faith) gratuitous aspects of this enmity, but they
have been unable to restrain it. 9

Indeed, one of the most striking developments of our time has been
the emergence of a kind of union, or at least a capacity for co
operation, between Protestant and Catholic fundamentalists, who
share a common puritanism and a common mindless militancy on

7 Robert H. Knapp and H. B. Goodrich: Origins of American Scientists (Chicago,
1952), p. 24; Robert H. Knapp and Joseph J. Grecnbaum; The Younger American
Scholar: His Collegiate Origins (Chicago, 1953), p. 99.

8 Harry Sylvester s article, "Problems of the Catholic Writer/ Atlantic Monthly,
Vol. CLXXXI (January, 1948), pp. 109-13, contains a stimulating discussion of the
subject.

?For evidence that Catholic clergy and laymen alike are unxxsually hostile to
freedom of thought and criticism, even on subjects remote from dogma, see Ger-
hardt Lenski: The Religious Factor (New York, 1960), especially p. 378.

14 1 The Revolt against Modernity

what they imagine to be political issues, which unite them in opposi
tion to what they repetitively call Godless Communism. Many
Catholics seem to have overcome the natural reluctance one might
expect them to have to join hands with the very type o bigoted
Protestant who scourged their ancestors. It seems a melancholy irony
that a union which the common bonds of Christian fraternity could
not achieve has been forged by the ecumenicism of hatred. During the
McCarthy era, the senator from Wisconsin had wide backing both from
right-wing Protestant groups and from many Catholics, who seemed
almost to believe that he was promulgating not a personal policy but a
Catholic policy. It mattered not a bit that the organs of Catholic intel
lectuals, like Commonweal and the Jesuits America? vigorously con
demned him. More recently the John Birch Society, despite its heavy
Protestant fundamentalist aura, has attracted enough Catholics to
cause at least one member of the hierarchy to warn them against it. For
Catholics there is a dangerous source of gratification in the present
indiscriminately anti-Communist mentality of the country. After more
than a century of persecution, it must feel luxurious for Catholics to
find their Americanism at last unquestioned, and to be able to join
with their former persecutors in common pursuit of a new interna
tional, conspiratorial, un-American enemy with a basically foreign
allegiance this time not in Rome but in Moscow. The pursuit is
itself so gratifying that it does not much matter that the menacing
domestic Communist has become a phantom. These Catholics will not
thank anyone, not even thinkers of their own faith, for interrupting
them with such irrelevancies at a time when they feel as though they
have Cromwell s men themselves on the run.

PART 3

The Politics of
Democracy

[ 145 3
CHAPTER VI

The Decline of the
Gentleman

W

Y THE

HEN THE United States began its national existence, the rela
tionship between intellect and power was not a problem. The leaders
were the intellectuals. Advanced though the nation was in the devel
opment of democracy, the control of its affairs still rested largely in a
patrician elite: and within this elite men of intellect moved freely and
spoke with enviable authority. Since it was an unspecialized and
versatile age, the intellectual as expert was a negligible force; but the
intellectual as ruling-class gentleman was a leader in every segment of
society at the bar, in the professions, in business, and in political
affairs. The Founding Fathers were sages, scientists, men of broad
cultivation, many of them apt in classical learning, who used their wide
reading in history, politics, and law to solve the exigent problems of
their time. No subsequent era in our history has produced so many men
of knowledge among its political leaders as the age of John Adams,
John Dickinson, Benjamin Franklin, Alexander Hamilton, Thomas
Jefferson, James Madison, George Mason, James Wilson, and George
Wythe\ One might have expected that such men, whose political
achievements were part of the very fabric of the nation, would have
stood as permanent and overwhelming testimonial to the truth that
men of learning and intellect need not be bootless and impractical as
political leaders.

It is ironic that the United States should have been founded by
intellectuals; for throughout most of our political history, the intellec-

THE POLITICS OF DEMOCRACY 146

tual has been for the most part either an outsider, a servant, or a
scapegoat. The American people have always cherished a deep histori
cal piety, second only to that felt for Lincoln, for what Dumas Malone
has called "the Great Generation," the generation which carried out
the Revolution and formed the Constitution. We may well ask how a
people with such beginnings and such pieties so soon lost their high
regard for mind in politics. Why, while most of the Founding Fathers
were still alive, did a reputation for intellect become a political disad
vantage?

^ In time, of course, the rule of the patrician elite was supplanted by a
popular democracy, but one cannot blame the democratic movement
alone for the decline in regard for intellect in politics. Soon after a
party division became acute, the members of the elite fell out among
themselves, and lost their respect for political standards. The men who
with notable character and courage led the way through the Revolu
tion and with remarkable prescience and skill organized a new na
tional government in 178788 had by 1796 become hopelessly divided
in their interests and sadly affected by the snarling and hysterical dif
ferences which were aroused by the French Revolution. 1 The genera
tion which wrote the Declaration of Independence and the Constitu
tion also wrote the Alien and Sedition Acts. Its eminent leaders lost
their solidarity, and their standards declined. A common membership
in the patrician class, common experiences in revolution and state-
making, a common core of ideas and learning did not prevent them
from playing politics with little regard for decency or common sense.
Political controversy, muddied by exaggerated charges of conspiracies
with French agents or plots to subvert Christianity or schemes to re
store monarchy and put the country under the heel of Great Britain,
degenerated into demagogy. Having no understanding of the uses of
political parties or of the function of a loyal opposition, the Founding
Fathers surrendered to their political passions and entered upon a
struggle in which any rhetorical weapon would do v \

Not even Washington was immune from abuse and slander; how
ever, the first notable victim of a distinctively anti-intellectualist
broadside was Thomas Jefferson, and his assailants were Federalist
leaders and members of the established clergy of New England. The
assault on Jefferson is immensely instructive because it indicates the
qualities his enemies thought could be used to discredit him and

1 See Marshall SmeLscr: "The Federalist Period as an Age of Passion/ Ameri
can Quarterly, Vol. X (Winter, 1958), pp. 391-419-

147 The Decline of the Gentleman

establishes a precedent for subsequent anti-intellectualist imagery in
our politics. In 1796, when it seemed that Jefferson might succeed
Washington, the s South Carolina Federalist" congressman, [William
Loughton Smith; published an anonymous pamphlet attacking Jeffer
son and minimizing his qualifications for the presidency. Smith tried to
show how unsettling and possibly even dangerous Jefferson s "doc
trinaire" leadership would be. Jefferson was a philosopher and, Smith
pointed out, philosophers have a way of being doctrinaires in politics
witness Locke s impracticable constitution for the Carolinas, Con-
dorcet s "political follies/ 7 and Rittenhouse s willingness to lend his
name to the Democratic Society of Philadelphia! 2

The characteristic traits of a philosopher, when he turns politi
cian, are, timidity, whimsicalness, and a disposition to reason from
certain principles, and not from the true nature of man; a prone-
ness to predicate all his measures on certain abstract theories,
formed in the recess of his cabinet, and not on the existing state of
things and circumstances; an inertness of mind, as applied to gov
ernmental policy, a wavering of disposition when great and sud
den emergencies demand promptness of decision and energy of
action.

What was needed was not intellect but character, and here too
Jefferson was found wanting: philosophers, the pamphleteer argued,
are extremely prone to flattery and avid of repute, and Jefferson s own
abilities "have been more directed to the acquirement of literary fame
than to the substantial good of his country." Washington there was a
man, no nonsense about him: "The great WASHINGTON was, thank
God, no philosopher; had he been one, we should never have seen his
great military exploits; we should never have prospered under his wise
administration." jSinitli hit upon a device that was to become standard
among the critics of intellect in politics portraying the curiosity of the
active mind as too trivial and ridiculous for important affairs,; He
mocked at Jefferson s skills in "impaling butterflies and insects, and

2 [William Loughton Smith] : The Pretensions of Thomas Jefferson to the
Presidency Examined (n.p., 1796), Part I, pp. 14-15. No one wishes to say that
ho is opposed to "genuine learning and wisdom but only to an inferior or debased
version. Smith thought Jefferson a bogus philosopher, not a "real" 1 one. He had only
the external and inferior characteristics of a philosopher, which meant, in politics,
**a want of steadiness, a constitutional indecision and versatility, visionary, wild,
and speculative systems, and various other defective features." Ibid., p. 16. Those
who remember Adlai Stevenson s campaigns will find in these quotations a
familiar ring.

THE POLITICS OF DEMOCRACY 148

contriving turn-about chairs** and also suggested that no real friend o
Jefferson, or of the country, would "draw this calm philosopher from
such useful pursuits" to plunge him into the ardors of politics. In lan
guage almost identical with that used a generation later against John
Quincy Adams, Smith suggested that Jefferson s merits "might entitle
him to the Professorship of a college, but they would be as compatible
with the duties of the presidency as with the command of the Western
army." 3

In Smith s attack, certain other preoccupations appear which fore
shadow the tone of later political literature. There was the notion that
military ability is a test of the kind of character which is good for
political leadership. It was assumed that a major part of civic charac
ter resides in military virtue; even today an intellectual in politics can
sometimes counteract the handicap of intellect by pointing to a record
of military service.

In the campaign of 1800 all inhibitions broke down. The attempt to
score against Jefferson on the ground that he was a man of thought and
learning was, of course, only one aspect of a comprehensive attack
upon his mind and character designed to show that he was a dangerous
demagogue without faith or morals or, as one critic put it, of "no
Conscience, no Religion, no Charity." It was charged that he kept a
slave wench and sired mulattoes; that he had been a coward during the
American Revolution; that he had started the French Revolution; that
he had slandered Washington; that he was ambitious to become a
dictator, another Bonaparte; that he was a visionary and a dreamer,
an impractical doctrinaire, and, to make matters worse, a French
doctrinaire. 4

The campaign against Jefferson became at the same time an at
tempt to establish as evil and dangerous the qualities of the specula
tive mind. Learning and speculation had made an atheist of Jefferson,
it was said; had caused him to quarrel with the views of the theologians
about the age of the earth and to oppose having school children read
the Bible. Such vagaries might be harmless in a closet philosopher, but
to allow him to bring these qualities of mind into the presidency would
be dangerous to religion and to society. 5 His abstractness of mind and

3 Ibid., pp, 4, 6, 16; Part H, p. 39.

4 For a summary of the worst assaults on Jefferson, see Charles O. Lerche, Jr.:
"Jefferson and the Election of 1800: A Case Study of the Political Smear," William
and Mary Quarterly, 3rd scr., Vol. V (October, X948), pp. 46791.

B [William Linn] : Serious Considerations on the Election of a President ( New
York, 1800 ) .

X 49 The Decline of the Gentleman

his literary interests made him unfit for practical tasks. He tended
always to theorize about government: "All the ideas which were de
rived from Experience were hooted at." 6 "I am ready to admit/ said
one Federalist pamphleteer, "that he is distinguished for shewy talents,
for theoretic learning, and for the elegance of his written style/ He
went on: 7

It was in France., where he resided nearly seven years, and
until the revolution had made some progress, that his disposition
to theory, and his skepticism in religion, morals, and government,
acquired full strength and vigor. . . . Mr. Jefferson is known to be
a theorist in politics, as well as in philosophy and morals. He is a
philosophe in the modern French sense of the word.

Eminent contemporaries agreed. Fisher Ames thought that Jefferson,
"like most men of genius . . . has been carried away by systems, and
the everlasting zeal to generalize, instead of proceeding, like common
men of practical sense, on the low, but sure foundation of matter of
fact." 8 The Federalist writer, Joseph Dennie, saw in him a favorite
pupil of the "dangerous, Deistical, and Utopian" school of French
philosophy. "The man has talents," Dennie conceded, 9

but they are of a dangerous and delusive kind. He has read much
and can write plausibly. He is a man of letters, and should be a
retired one. His closet, and not the cabinet, is his place. In the
first, he might harmlessly examine the teeth of a non-descript mon
ster, the secretions of an African, or the almanac of Banneker. . . .
At the seat of government his abstract, inapplicable, metaphysico-
politics are either nugatory or noxious. Besides, his principles relish
so strongly of Paris and are seasoned with such a profusion of
French garlic, that he offends the whole nation. Better for Ameri
cans that on their extended plains "thistles should grow, instead
of wheat, and cockle, instead of barley," than that a philosopher
should influence the councils of the country, and that his admira
tion of the works of Voltaire and Helvetius should induce him to
wish a closer connexion with Frenchmen.

(J Connecticut Courant, July la, 1800, quoted in Lerchc: op. cit., p. 475.
7 Address to the Citizens of South Carolina on the Approaching Election of a
and V ice-President of the United States. By a Federal Republican

(Charlostown, 1800), pp. 9, 10, 15.

H Seth Ames, ed.: The Life and Works of Fisher Ames (Boston, 1854), Vol. II,
p. 134.

** Th0 Lai/ Preacher, ed. by Millon Ellis (New York, 1943), p. 174; the essay
originally appeared in the Port Folio, Vol. I ( 1801 ).

THE POLITICS OF DEMOCRACY 150

Charles Carroll o Carrollton thought Jefferson "too theoretical and
fanciful a statesman to direct with prudence the affairs of this extensive
and growing confederacy/ * The implication seemed clear: the young
confederacy must learn to keep men of intellectual genius out of
practical affairs.

The demagogic attacks made on Jefferson by the established clergy
may be explained also by the fact that he had forged a singular, and to
them obnoxious, coalition. Jefferson, although a Deist and a man of
secular learning, had roused many supporters among the evangelical
and pietistic denominations, particularly among the Baptists. Not only
were they impressed by Jefferson s reputation for democratic senti
ments, but as diss&nters they were also impressed by his espousal of
toleration. They were far less troubled by the charges of infidelity
hurled at him than by the disabilities imposed on themselves by the
established churches. Jefferson and other secular intellectuals thus
joined the pietistic denominations in a curious political alliance based
upon common hostility to established orthodoxy, Both groups appealed
to standards of authority alien to the established churches: the secular
liberals to rationalist criticism, the pietists to intuition. For the mo
ment, under the pressure of their common dislike of established dogma,
the liberals and pietists chose to ignore their own differences, and to
set aside the fact that the one objected to all dogma and the other to all
establishments . 2

To drive a wedge into this alliance, the established clergy tried to
demonstrate that Jefferson was a threat to all Christians a charge that
many of them in their partisan anguish no doubt sincerely believed. In
time the alliance between the pietists and the enlightened liberals did
break up; a gap was opened between the common man and the intel
lectual which has seldom since been satisfactorily bridged. But at the
time of Jefferson s election the alliance between liberal intellect
and evangelical democracy still held good. When the break finally
occurred, when the upsurging forces of popular democracy were
released from the restraining hand of enlightened patrician leader
ship, the forces of evangelicalism produced an anti-intellectualism

1 In a letter to Alexander Hamilton, in J. C. Hamilton, ed.: The Works of
Alexander Hamilton (New York, 1850-51), Vol. VI, pp, 434-5, Hamilton himself
understood that Jefferson, far from being a thoroughgoing doctrinaire, was a
temporizing and opportunistic statesman.

2 On the nature of this allianee and the consequences of its ultimate dissolution,
see Sidney E. Mead s penetrating essay, American Protestantism during the
Revolutionary Epoch," Church History, Vol. XII (December, 1953), pp. 379-97.

The Decline of the Gentleman

every bit as virulent and of far more effect than that employed by the
established clergy against Jefferson.

The shabby campaign against Jefferson, and then the Alien and Sedi
tion Acts, manifested the treason of many wealthy and educated
Federalists against the cultural values of tolerance and freedom. Un
fortunately, it did not follow that more popular parties under Jeffer-
sonian or Jacksonian leadership could be counted on to espouse these
values. The popular parties themselves eventually became the vehicles
of a kind of primitivist and anti-intellectualist populism hostile to the
specialist, the expert, the gentleman, and the scholar.

Even in its earliest days, the egalitarian impulse in America was
linked with a distrust for -what in its germinal form may be called
political specialization and in its later forms expertise. Popular writers,
understandably proud of the political competence of the free man,
were on the whole justifiably suspicious of the efforts of the cultivated
and wealthy to assume an exclusive or excessively dominant role in
government. Their suspicions did not stop there, however, but led
many of them into hostility to all forms of learning. A current of anti-
intellectualism can be found in some of the earliest expressions of
popular political thought. In the revolutionary era, some popular
writers assumed that efforts to limit the power of the rich and well
born would have to include their allies, the learned classes, as well. A
rural delegate to the convention elected in Massachusetts to decide on
the ratification of the Constitution in 1788 explained his opposition to
the document in these words: 3

These lawyers, and men of learning, and moneyed men, that
talk so finely, and gloss over matters so smoothly, to make us poor
illiterate people swallow down, the pill, expect to get into Con
gress themselves; they expect to be the managers of this constitu
tion, and get all the power and all the money into their own hands,
and then they will swallow up all us little folks, like the great
Leviathan, Mr. President; yes, just as the whale swallowed up
Jonah. This is what I am afraid of.

We are fortunate to have, from the hands of a plain New England
farmer, William Manning of North Billerica, Massachusetts, a political

s Jonathan Elliot: Debates (Philadelphia, 1863), Vol. II, p. 102.

THE POLITICS OF DEMOCRACY 152,

pamphlet showing what one shrewd, militantly democratic American
thought when he turned his mind to the philosophy of government.
This spirited Jeffersonian document, The Key of Libberty, was written
in 1798 at a time when party passions were at a high pitch. Noteworthy
here is the central place accorded by Manning ( "not a Man of Laming
my selfe for I never had the advantage of six months schooling in my
life") to learning as a force in the political struggle. The opening words
of his manuscript proclaim: "Learning & Knowledg is essential to the
preservation of Libberty & unless we have more of it amongue us we
Cannot Seporte our Libertyes Long." 4 But to Manning learning and
knowledge were of interest mainly as class weapons.

At the heart of Manning s philosophy was a profound suspicion of
the learned and property-holding classes. Their education, their free
time, and the nature of their vocations made it possible, he saw, for the
merchants, lawyers, doctors, clergymen, and executive and judicial
officers of state to act together in pursuit of their ends, as the laboring
man could not. Among these classes there is, he thought, a general dis
like of free government: they constantly seek to destroy it because it
thwarts their selfish interests.

To ef ect this no cost nor pains is spared, but they first unite their
plans and schemes by asotiations, conventions & corraspondances
with each other. The Marchents asotiate by themselves, the
Phitisians by themselves, the Ministers by themselves, the Juditial
and Executive Officers are by their professions often called to
gether & know each others minds, & all Ictirary men & the over
grown rich, that can live without labouring, can spare time for
consultation. All being bound together by common interest, which
is the strongest bond of union, join in their secret correspondance
to counter act the interests of the many & pick their pockets,
which is efected ondly for want of the mcens of knowledg
amongue them.

Since learning is an instrument for the pursuit of one s interests, "the
few" naturally favor the institutions that serve their own class: "the
few are always crying up the advantages of costly collages, national
acadimyes & grammer schooles, in ordir to make places for men to live
without work and so strengthen their party. But are always opposed to

4 Samuel Eliot Morison, ed.: The Key of Libberty (Billerica, Mass., 1922). The
work is reprinted in William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd ser., Vol. XIII (April, 1956),
pp. 2.03-54, and quotations in the following paragraphs are from pp. aai, 222, 0,2,6,

153 The Decline of the Gentleman

schooles & woman schooles, the ondly or prinsaple means by
which laming is spred amongue the Many." In the colleges ( Manning
no doubt had Federalist Harvard in mind) the principles of republi
canism are criticized, and the young are indoctrinated with mon
archical notions. Manning also observed that the graduates of these
institutions "are taught to keep up the dignity of their professions"
and to this he objected because it made them set too high a value on
their services, and thus made religious and educational services ex
pensive to the many: "For if we apply for a preacher or a School
Master, we are told the price, So Much, & they cant go under, for it is
agreed upon & they shall be disgrased if they take less." As Manning
saw it, the schoolmaster ought to become what in fact he did become
in America an inexpensive hired laborer of very low status. >

Here, then, is the key to Manning s educational strategy. Education
was to be made cheap for the common man; and higher education,
such as there was, would be organized simply to serve elementary
education to provide inexpensive instructors for the common schools.
"Larning . . . aught to be promoted in the cheepest and best manner
possable" in such a way, that is, that "we should soone have a plenty
of school masters & misstrisejs as cheep as we could hire other labour, &
Labour & Larning would be connected together & lessen the number of
those that live without work." It must be said that Manning s prescrip
tion, offered at a time when the vaunted common school system of
Massachusetts was being neglected, had its point. But in the interests
of the lower reaches of the educational system he proposed to strip the
upper reaches, to reduce their functions to that of producing cheap
academic labor. Advanced learning Manning considered to have no
intrinsic value worth cultivating. Academies and classical studies that
went beyond what was necessary "to teach our Children a b c" were
"ondly to give imploy to gentlemens sons & make places for men to live
without worke. For their is no more need for a mans haveing a knowl
edge of all the languages to teach a Child to read write & cifer than
their is for a farmer to have the marinors art to hold plow." Education
had been for a long time the instrument of the few; Manning hoped to
make it, so far as possible, the instrument of the many. Of its instru
mental, and hence subservient, character he had no doubt; nor did he
worry about the consequence of his policy for high culture which
was, after all, the prerogative of those who lived without work.

The place of education, in this controversy between the few and the
many, is a perfect paradigm of the place of high culture in American

THE POLITICS OF DEMOCKACY 154

politics. Education was caught between a comfortable class only im
perfectly able to nourish it, and a powerful, upsurging, egalitarian
public chiefly interested in leveling status distinctions and in stripping
the privileged of the instruments of privilege. Understandably, the
common man wanted to protect his interests and use education to
expand his social opportunities; no one seemed able to show him how
to do this without damage to intellectual culture its elf. \

That there was a certain rough justice in Manning s contentions
cannot be denied. The Federalists had indeed appropriated Harvard
College; why should the democrats not retaliate by appropriating as
far as they could the instruments of common education? If they could
have their way, there would be no more Harvard Colleges. If a learned
class could do nothing but support privilege, there need be no learned
class. Almost half a century after Manning wrote his essay, Horace
Greeley argued that the American yeoman did in fact appreciate and
respect talent and learning; but that all too often he found them
"directed to the acquisition of wealth and luxury by means which add
little to the aggregate of human comforts, and rather subtract from his
own especial share of them." G Hence, as the demand for the rights of
the common man took form in nineteenth-century America, it included
a program for free elementary education, but it also carried with it a
dark and sullen suspicion of high culture, as a creation of the enemy.

3 *

Something was missing in the dialectic of American populistic democ
racy. Its exponents meant to diminish, if possible to get rid of, status
differences in American life, to subordinate educated as well as
propertied leadership. If the people were to rule, if they aspired to get
along with as little leadership as possible from the educated and
propertied classes, whence would their guidance come? The answer
was that it could be generated from within. As popular democracy
gained strength and confidence, it reinforced the widespread belief in
the superiority of inborn, intuitive, folkish wisdom over the cultivated,
oversophisticated, and self-interested knowledge of the literati and
the well-to-do A Just as the evangelicals repudiated a learned religion
and a formally constituted clergy in favor of the wisdom of the heart
and direct access to God, so did advocates of egalitarian politics pro-

e In an address at Hamilton College, January #3, 1844, quoted in Merle Curti:
American Paradox ( New Brunswick, 1956 ), p. 20; cf. pp. 19-24,

X 55 The Decline of the Gentleman

pose to dispense with trained leadership in favor of the native practical
sense of the ordinary man with its direct access to truth. This prefer
ence for the wisdom of the common man flowered, in the most extreme
statements of the democratic creed, into a kind of militant popular
anti-intellectualism."

Even Jefferson, who was neither an anti-intellectual nor a dogmatic
egalitarian, seemed at times to share this preference. To his nephew,
Peter Carr, he wrote in 1787: "State a moral case to a ploughman and a
professor. The former will decide it as well, and often better than the
latter, because he has not been led astray by artificial rules." 6 Jefferson
was simply expressing a conventional idea of eighteenth-century think
ing: the idea that God had given man certain necessary moral senti
ments. It would not have occurred to him to assert the intellectual
superiority of the plowman. But one need only go one step further than
Jefferson, and say that political questions were in essence moral
questions, 7 to lay a foundation for the total repudiation of cultivated
knowledge in political life. For if the plowman understood morals as
well as the professor, he would understand politics equally well; and
he was likely to conclude (here Jefferson would not have agreed) that
he had little to learn from anyone, and had no need of informed lead
ers. Push the argument just a bit further and it would support the as
sertion that anyone who had anything of the professor about him made
an inferior leader; and that political leaders should be sought from
among those who in this respect resembled the untutored citizen.
Ironically, Jefferson himself was to suffer from this notion. Later it be
came one of the rallying cries of Jacksonian democracy.

The first truly powerful and widespread impulse to anti-intellectual-
ism in American politics was, in fact, given by the Jacksonian move
ment. Its distrust of expertise, its dislike for centralization, its desire to

G Writings, A. E. Bergh, ed., Vol. VI (Washington, 1907), pp. 257-8, August 10,
1787. Jefferson was advising his nephew on the conduct of his education, and his
chief concern was to establish the point that much study of moral philosophy was
"lost time." If moral conduct were a matter of science rather than sound impulse, he

E ointed out, the millions who had no formal learning would be less moral than the
,jw who had. Clearly, God had not left men without a moral sense, and a very
small stock of reason or common sense would be needed to implement it. This
was, of course, a familiar doctrine. Jefferson may well have been led to it by the
writings of Lord JCames. One may wonder, however, if the study of moral philoso
phy was useless, why Jefferson had read so widely in this field. On the problems
created in his thinking by this doctrine, see Adrienne Koch: The Philosophy of
Thomas Jefferson ( New York, 1943 ) , chapter 3.

r As, a century after JelTerson, William Jennings Bryan most explicitly did: "The
great political questions are in their final analysis great moral questions." Paxton
Hibberi: The Peerless Leader (New York, 1929), p. 194,

THE POLITICS OF DEMOCRACY 156

uproot the entrenched classes, and its doctrine that important func
tions were simple enough to be performed by anyone, amounted to a
repudiation not only of the system of government by gentlemen which
the nation had inherited from the eighteenth century, but also of the
special value of the educated classes in civic life. In spite of this, many
intellectuals and men of letters, particularly the young, supported the
Jacksonian cause enough, indeed, to belie the common charge that
the educated classes regularly withheld their sympathies from move
ments meant to benefit the common man. It is true that the leading
literary quarterlies were devoted to gentility and remained in the
hands of the Whig opposition; but when John L. O Sullivan founded
the Democratic Review he was able to get contributions from a distin
guished roster of writers of varying political persuasions. It is also true
that the leading New England Transcendentalists were largely aloof or
hostile. But writers like Orestes Brownson, William Cullen Bryant,
George Bancroft, James Fenimore Cooper, Nathaniel Hawthorne,
James Kirke Paulding, and Walt Whitman supported the new democ
racy with varying degrees of cordiality and persistence. 8

The support of such men was welcomed in Jacksonian ranks, and
was sometimes greeted with pride, but on the whole, intellectuals were
not accorded much recognition or celebrity. The most outstanding ex
ception was George Bancroft, the historian. In Massachusetts the
Democrats felt the need of literary and intellectual leadership to
counter the distinguished array of talent in the ranks of the opposition,
and Bancroft assumed prominence in his party when he was still in his
thirties. He was appointed Collector of the Port of Boston, became
Secretary of the Navy under Polk (a post also given to Paulding by
Van Buren), and was later minister to Great Britain. His influence
enabled him to find a job for Hawthorne in the Boston Custom House
and for Brownson (to Bancroft s prompt regret) as steward of the
Marine Hospital there. The situation of Hawthorne represents the other
side of the picture. He was constantly honored with jobs considerably
slighter than his merits or his desperate needs would have dictated. In
the Custom House he was no more than a weigher and gauger, and the
post ( a "grievous thraldom/ he called it ) was a poor substitute for the
position he had actually sought as historian to an expedition to the
Antarctic. Later he sought the postrnastership of Salem and was made
instead surveyor of the port. And finally, after writing a campaign

the relation of Jacksonian democracy and the intellectuals, see Arthur
, Jr.: The Age of Jackson (Boston, 1945 ), especially chapter 29.

157 The Decline of the Gentleman

biography of his friend and college classmate, Franklin Pierce, he was
awarded a consulate but at Liverpool, On the whole, the record of
Jacksonian democracy in achieving a rapprochement between the in
tellectual or man of letters and the popular mind was inferior to that
later achieved by Progressivism and tie New Deal;

The contests in 1824 and 1828 between Jackson and John Quincy
Adams provided a perfect study in contrasting political ideals. Adams s
administration was the test case for the unsuitability of the intellectual
temperament for political leadership in early nineteenth-century Amer
ica. The last President to stand in the old line of government by gentle
men, Adams became the symbol of the old order and the chief victim
of the reaction against the learned man. He had studied in Paris,
Amsterdam, Leyden, and The Hague, as well as at Harvard; he had
occupied Harvard s chair of rhetoric and oratory; he had aspired to
write epic poetry; like Jefferson, he was known for his scientific in
terests; he had been head for many years of the American Academy
of Arts and Sciences; and as Monroe s Secretary of State he had pre
pared a learned scientific report on systems of weights and measures
which is still a classic. Adams believed that if the new republic failed to
use its powers to develop the arts and sciences it would be "hiding in
the earth the talent committed to our charge would be treachery to
the most sacred of trusts." It was his hope as it had been Washington s,
Jefferson s and Madison s that the federal government would act as
the guide and center of a national program of educational and scientific
advancement. But in proposing that Washington be developed as a
cultural capital, he mobilized against himself the popular dislike of
centralization.

In his first annual message to Congress, Adams proposed a system
of internal improvements roads and canals advantageous to busi
ness interests, and also asked for several things desired chiefly by men
of the learned classes: a national university at Washington, a profes
sional naval academy, a national observatory, a voyage of discovery to
the Northwest to follow upon the expedition of Lewis and Clark, an
efficient patent office, federal aid to the sciences through a new execu
tive department.

It was characteristic of Adams to offend the same bumptious popu
lar nationalism to which Jackson so perfectly appealed. Adams pointed
out that European countries, though less happily blessed with freedom
than America, were doing more for science; and he had the temerity
to suggest that some policies of the governments of France, Great

THE POLITICS OF DEMOCRACY 158

Britain, and Russia could well be emulated here. Then, as now, such
intellectual cosmopolitanism was unpopular. Having thus flouted na
tional amour-propre, Adams went on to flout democratic sentiment by
ur g^ n g generous appropriations for scientific purposes; he even sug
gested in an inflammatory phrase that Congressional leaders should not
"fold up our arms and proclaim to the world that we are palsied by the
will of our constituents/ Worse still, Adams referred provocatively
to the many observatories built under the patronage of European gov
ernments as "lighthouses of the skies/* Congress snickered at this
phrase, and the lighthouses were thrown back at Adams time and
again. His own Cabinet saw that the President s program would shock
the country Clay, for instance, found the proposal of a national
university "certainly hopeless/ and doubted that Adams could get five
votes in the House for his proposed executive department and in the
end Adams had to give it up. He represented a kind of leadership
which had outlived its time. Hamilton, Washington, even Jefferson,
had been interested in a measure of centralization within some kind
of national plan, and had expressed the desire common among the
gentlemen of the Eastern seaboard to give some order to the expansion
of America. But the country grew too fast for them, and would ac
cept no plan and no order. As their type became obsolete in politics,
the position of the man of intellect also deteriorated. Adams was the
last nineteenth-century occupant of the White House who had a knowl
edgeable sympathy with the aims and aspirations of science or who
believed that fostering the arts might properly be a function of the
federal government.

As Adams embodied the old style, Andrew Jackson embodied the
new; and the opposition between these two in the politics of the 1820*5
symbolized what America had been and what it would become. In
headlong rebellion against the European past, Americans thought of
"decadent" Europe as more barbarous than "natural" America; they
feared that their own advancing civilization was "artificial" and might
estrange them from Nature. Jackson s advocates praised him as the
representative of the natural wisdom of the natural man. Among his
other gifts as a national leader, the hero of New Orleans, the con
queror of the "barbaric" army of cultivated Britain was able to offer

9 For Adams s program, see J, R. Richardson: Messages and Papers of the Presi
dents (New York, 1897), Vol. II, pp. 865-83, and the comments of A. Hunter
Dupree: Science in the Federal Government (Cambridge, 1957), pp. 39-43; c.
Samuel Flagg Bemis: John Quincy Adams and the Union (New York, 1956),
PP- 65-70.

The Decline of the Gentleman

reassurances as to the persistence of native vigor and the native style.
Jackson, it was said, had been lucky enough to have escaped the formal
training that impaired the "Vigour and originality of the understand
ing." Here was a man of action, "educated in Nature s school/ who was
"artificial in nothing"; who had fortunately "escaped the training and
dialectics of the schools ; who had a "judgement unclouded by the
visionary speculations of the academician"; who had, "in an extraor
dinary degree, that native strength of mind, that practical common
sense, that power and discrimination of judgement which^ for all use
ful purposes, are more valuable than all the acquired learning of a
sage"; whose mind did not have to move along "the tardy avenues of
syllogism, nor over the beaten track of analysis, or the hackneyed walk
of logical induction," because it had natural intuitive power and could
go "with the lightning s flash and illuminate its own pathway." x

George Bancroft, who must have believed that his own career as a
schoolmaster had been useless, rhapsodized over Jackson s unschooled
mind: 2

Behold, then, the unlettered man of the West, the nursling of
the wilds, the farmer of the Hermitage, little versed in books, un
connected by science with the tradition of the past, raised by the
will of the people to the highest pinnacle of honour, to the cen
tral post in the civilization of republican freedom. . . . What
policy will he pursue? What wisdom will he bring with him
from the forest? What rules of duty will he evolve from the oracles
of his own mind?

Against a primitivist hero of this sort, who brought wisdom straight out
of the forest, Adams, with his experience at foreign courts and his
elaborate education, seemed artificial. Even in 1824, when Adams won
a freakish f our-way election, Jackson was by far the more popular can
didate; when the General returned to challenge him four years later,
there could be no doubt of the outcome. Adams was outdone in every
vscction of the country but New England, in a battle fought unscrupu
lously on both sides and described as a contest between

John Quincy Adams who can write
And Andrew Jackson who can fight.

1 The quotations from Jacksoninn literature are from John William Ward:
Andrew Jackson; Symbol for an Age (New York, 1955), pp. 31, 49, 52, 53> 68. 1 am
much indebted to Professor Ward s brilliant study of Jacksonian imagery.

a Ward: op. eit., p. 73.

THE POLITICS OF DEMOCRACY 160

The main case made by Jackson s spokesmen against Adams was that
he was self -indulgent and aristocratic and lived a life of luxury. And,
what is most relevant here, his learning and political training were
charged up not as compensating virtues but as additional vices. A
group of Jackson s supporters declared that the nation would not be
much better off for Adams s intellectual accomplishments: 3

That he is learned we are willing to admit; but his wisdom we
take leave to question. . . , We confess our attachment to the
homely doctrine: thus happily expressed by the great English
poet:

That not to know of things remote
From use, obscure and subtle, but to know-
That which before us lies in daily life,
Is the prime wisdom.

That wisdom we believe Gen. Jackson possesses in an eminent de
gree.

Another Jacksonian, speaking of the past record of the two, said: "Jack
son made law, Adams quoted it/* 4

Jackson s triumph over Adams was overwhelming. It would be an
exaggeration to say that this was simply a victory of the man of action
over the man of intellect, since the issue was posed to the voters
mainly as a choice between aristocracy and democracy. But as the
two sides fashioned the public images of the candidates, aristocracy
was paired with sterile intellect, and democracy with native intuition
and the power to act. 5 \

3 Address of the Republican General Committee of Young Men of the City and
County of New York (New York, 1828), p. 41.

4 Ward: op. cit., p. 63.

5 Electoral appeals on both sides were lacking in truth and delicacy; and
Adams never repudiated the viler aspersions cast by the Adams propagandists
upon Jackson s lite with Mrs. Jackson. Adams seems to have been persuaded that
these were justified. In 1831 he wrote in his diary that "Jackson lived in open
adultery with his wife." Most of the Brahmin world found itself unable to embrace
Jackson as President. Harvard did award him an honorary degree of Doctor of
Laws at its 1833 commencement, but Adams refused to attend. "I -would not be
present/* he wrote, "to see my darling Harvard disgrace herself by conferring a
Doctor s degree upon a barbarian and savage who can scarcely spell his own
name." Bemis: op. cit., p. 250; see also Adams s Memoirs, Vol. VIII (Philadelphia,
1876), pp. 546-7. Adams was told by President Quincy of Harvard that he was
well aware how "utterly unworthy of literary honors Jackson was," but that after a
degree had been awarded to Monroe it would be necessary to honor Jackson to
avoid the show of "party spirit/ At the occasion itself, Jackson appears to have
charmed the hostile audience. But the rumor went about, and was widely believed
by the credulous in Cambridge and Boston, that Jackson had responded to the
ceremonies, which were in Latin, by rising and saying: "Caveat emptor: corpus

i6i The Decline of the Gentleman

4

Although the Jacksonians appealed powerfully to both egalitarian and
anti-intellectual sentiments, they had no monopoly on either. It was
not merely Jacksonianism that was egalitarian it was the nation itself.
. The competitive two-party system guaranteed that an irresistible ap
peal to the voters would not long remain in the hands of one side, for it
would be copied. It was only a question of time before Jackson s op
ponents, however stunned by the tactics of his supporters in 1828,
would swallow their distaste for democratic rhetoric and learn to use it.
Party leaders who could not or would not play the game would soon
be driven off the fieldj

A persistent problem facing party organizers who were linked to
men of affairs to promoters of canals, banks, turnpikes, and manufac
turing enterprises was to manage to identify themselves with the peo
ple and to find safe popular issues -which they could exploit without
risk to their interests. There was a premium on men who could keep
touch with the common people and yet move comfortably and func
tion intelligently in the world of political management and business
enterprise, 6 Henry Clay was so gifted, and he had many of the qualities
of a major public hero as well; but by the beginning of the 1830*5 he
had been on the national scene too long; his views were too well
known, and he was too closely associated with the discredited Adams
to be of use. Most notable among the new party bosses with a good
grasp of the problem was Thurlow Weed, who used the violently egali
tarian passions of anti-Masonry to ride into prominence, and who
became one of the greatest of the Whig, and then Republican, party
organizers. But the anti- Jacksonians, for all they may have learned in
182,8, did not find the figure who set quite the right style for them until
Davy Crockett bolted from the ranks of the Jacksonians.

Frontiersman, hunter, fighter, and spokesman of the poor Western
squatter, Crockett became a major American folk symbol, and his
autobiography a classic of American frontier humor. Unembarrassed
by wealth or education, Crockett was drawn into politics by the force

delicti: ex post facto: dies irae: e pluribus unum: usque ad nauseam: Ursa Major:
sic semper tyrannis: quid pro quo: requiescat in pace." See the recollections of
Josiah Quincy: Figures of the Past (Boston, 19^6), pp. 304-7.

6 Cf. the analysis of the situation in Glyndon G. Van Deusen: Thurlow Weed:
Wizard of the Lobby (Boston, 1947), pp. 42-4; and Whitney R. Cross: The
Burned-Over District (Ithaca, 1950), pp. 11417.

THE POLITICS OF DBMOCRACY 162,

of his own appeal. When he was about thirty, and newly arrived at a
small settlement on Shoal Creek in Tennessee, he was appointed jus
tice of the peace., was soon elected colonel of the militia regiment
organized in his district, and then sent to the state legislature. In 1826,
after it had been casually suggested to him that he run for Congress,
he waged a campaign enlivened by funny stories, and found himself
elected. Tennessee now had a representative in Congress who could
"wade the Mississippi, carry a steam-boat on his back, and whip his
weight in wild cats," and who was not afraid, for all his simplicity, to
address the House because he could "whip any man in it."

It was Crockett s pride to represent the native style and natural in
tuition. In his autobiography, published in 1834, Crockett boasted of
the decisions he handed down from the Tennessee bench at a time
when he "could just barely write my own name/* "My judgments were
never appealed from, and if they had been they would have stuck like
wax, as I gave my decisions on the principles of common justice and
honesty between man and man, and relied on natural born sense, and
not on law learning to guide me; for I had never read a page in a law
book in all my life." 7 This ingenuous confidence in the sufficiency of
common sense may have been justified by Crockett s legal decisions,
but he was not content to stop here: he had a considered disdain for
the learned world. At one point in his Congressional career, Crockett
reported: 8

There were some gentlemen that invited me to go to Cam
bridge, where the big college or university is; where they
keep ready-made titles or nicknames to give people. I would not
go, for I did not know but they might stick an LL.D. on me before
they let me go; and I had no idea of changing "Member of the
House of Representatives of the United States/* for what stands
for lazy lounging dunce," which I am sure my constituents
would have translated my new title to be, knowing that I had
never taken any degree, and did not own to any, except a small
degree of good sense not to pass for what I was not. . . .

Crockett, who had fought under Jackson in the Creek War in
1813-14, first went to Congress as a member of the Jacksonian group

7 Hamlin Garland, ed.: The Autobiography of ~Davy Crockett (New York,
1923), p. 90.

8 Ibid., p. 180. The main butt of the humor here was Andrew Jackson, who had
already received his Harvard degree. "One digniterry" said Crockett, "was enough
from Tennessee/*

The Decline of the Gentleman

from Tennessee and as a representative of the poor Western squatters
of the state, whose condition was very much what his had once been.
Before long, he found these two loyalties in conflict. A group of Ten-
nesseeans, led by James K. Pollc, was attempting to get the United
States to cede to the state some unappropriated Western District lands
as an endowment for education. The interests of education and the
interests of the poorer classes seemed unfortunately to be thrown into
conflict at this time, and Crockett, as the representative of the squat
ters, naturally looked askance at Folk s land bill. Land warrants held
by the University of North Carolina had already caused some of his
constituents to lose their homes. Crockett concluded that the proposal
to use part of the land proceeds for a college in Nashville would in the
same way hurt others. His constituents, he pointed out, would not be
compensated by the development of colleges, for none of them could
use them. If, he remarked, "we can only get a common country, or as
College Graduates sometimes deridingly call it, a B-a school, con
venient enough to send our Big Boys in the winter and our little ones
all the year, we think ourselves fortunate, especially if we can raise
enough Coon-Skins and one little thing or other to pay up the teacher
at the end of every quarter.** 9

Explaining in Congress that he was not an opponent of education,
Crockett pointed out that he felt obliged, none the less, to defend the
interests of the people he represented, who had "mingled the sweat of
their brows with the soil they occupied," and who were now to have
their "humble cottages" taken away from them by "the Legislature of
the State, for the purpose of raising up schools for the children of the
rich." x

I repeat, that I was utterly opposed to this, not because I am
the enemy of education, but because the benefits of education are
not to be dispensed with an equal hand. This College system
went into practice to draw a line of demarcation between the
two classes of society it separated the children of the rich from
the children of the poor. The children of my people never saw

9 Quoted in Charles Grier Sellers, Jr.: James K. Polk, Jacksonian: 1795-1843
(Princeton, 1957), pp. 123-4. On the land bill, see ibid., pp. 122-8; James A.
Shackford: David Crockett, the Man and the Legend (Chapel Hill, 1956),
pp. 90-9.

1 Register of Debates, 2oth Congress, 2nd session, pp. 1623 (January 5, 1829).
In raising the question of the diversion of funds for the use of colleges, Crockett
was here using a false issue, since Polk had already attempted to mollify Crockett
by inserting a requirement that the proceeds of land sales be used only for common
schools.

THE POLITICS OF DEMOCRACY 164

the inside o a college in their lives, and never are likely to do so.
. . . If a swindling machine is to be set up to strip them of what
little the surveyors, and the colleges, and the warrant holders,
have left them, it shall never be said that I sat by in silence, and
refused, however humbly, to advocate their cause,

We hear in this an echo of Manning s idea that common schools serve
the people and colleges the rich. For American society it was tragic
that the interests of higher education and those of the ordinary citizen
should thus be allowed to appear to be in conflict. But to the Adams-
Clay men, always under severe pressure from the Jackson forces, the
split in the ranks of the Tennessee Jacksonians came as a gift from
heaven. Before long, the astute opposition organisers, realizing that
to have a pioneer democrat in their ranks would give them a magnifi
cent counterpoise to Jackson, approached Crockett and took advantage
of his alienation from the Jackson men in his state and his long-standing
personal resentment of the President to bring him around to the opposi
tion. This alliance between Crockett and the national anti-Jackson
forces, negotiated by Matthew St. Clair Clarke, a friend of Nicholas
Biddle, the president of the United States Bank, was apparently in the
making as early as 1829 and was clearly consolidated by 1832. Crock
ett s Congressional speeches began to be written for him, and various
parts of his famous Autobiography were also ghost-written, though
they have about them the air of Crockett s own dictation. 2 In 1835
Crockett published an assault upon Martin Van Buren that prefigured
the full-blown demagogy of the Whig campaign of 1840.

By 1840 the conquest of the Whig Party by the rhetoric of populism
was complete. Crockett, who was too provincial and too unreliable to
have presidential stature, had gone off to Texas, had been killed in the
defense of the Alamo, and had begun to be transformed into a demi
god; but in the presidential election of 1836 William Henry Harrison,
like Jackson a hero of early Indian campaigns, had been found to have
a similar public appeal. It mattered little that his famous victory over
Tecumseh s forces at Tippecanoe in 1811 had been something of a
fiasco; with skillful publicity and some lapse of memory on the part
of the public, it could be glorified into a feat comparable, almost, to
Old Hickory s victory at New Orleans. The common touch was sup
plied in 1840 by the log-cabin and hard-cider theme, although Har
rison lived in a rather substantial mansion on the banks of the Ohio. It

2 The most satisfactory account of Crockett s rapprochement with the Eastern
conservatives and the authorship o his speeches and autobiographical writings is
tihatof Shackford: op. cit., pp.

165 The Decline of the Gentleman

seems in fact to have been the depression that tipped the scales against
Van Buren, but the Whigs tried to assure their victory by using against
him the same techniques of ballyhoo and misrepresentation that the
Jacksonians had used against John Quincy Adams twelve years earlier.
Representative Charles Ogle of Pennsylvania struck the keynote of the
campaign in April when he delivered in the House his masterful ad
dress on "The Regal Splendor of the President s Palace," which was
distributed as a pamphlet in thousands of copies. Speaking against a
trifling appropriation of some $3,600 for alterations and repairs in the
White House and its grounds, Ogle entertained the House with a fan
tastic account of the luxurious life of Martin Van Buren, easily eclipsing
similar claims that had been made against Adams in 1828. This tirade
reached a climax when Ogle denounced Van Buren for having in
stalled in the White House some bathtubs which, in Ogle s opulent
phrases, took on the dimensions of the baths of Caracalla. 3

A Whig banner of 1840 proclaimed, with all too much truth: "WE
STOOP TO CONQUER." Cultivated and hitherto fastidious men,
once opposed to universal manhood suffrage, now proclaimed them
selves friends of the people and gave their consent to the broadest and
most irrational campaign techniques. Eminent politicians, raised on
the controversies of an earlier and somewhat more restrained era, may
have gagged, but they went along with the use of what one newspaper
called "The Davy Crockett Line." A reserved and cultivated Southern
aristocrat, Hugh Swinton Legare, swallowed his distaste and went on a
speaking tour. Daniel Webster was inspired to say that although he
had not had the good fortune to be born in a log cabin, "my elder
brother and sisters were. . . . That cabin I annually visit, and thither
I carry my children, that they may learn to honor and emulate the stern
and simple virtues that there found their abode. . . /* Anyone who
called him an aristocrat was "not only a LIAR but a COWARD," and
must be prepared to fight if Webster could get at him. Henry Clay, for
his part, said privately that he "lamented the necessity, real or imag
ined ... of appealing to the feelings and passions of our Country
men, rather than to their reasons and judgments/* and then did exactly
that.

Sensitive men in the Whig ranks may have shrunk from the rhetoric
of the log-cabin, hard-cider campaign, but if they wanted to stay in
politics they could not shrink too long. The gentleman as a force in
American politics was committing suicide. John Quincy Adams, watch-

3 Charles Ogle: The Regal Splendor of the President s Palace (n.p., 1840),
especially p. 2,3.

THE POLITICS OF DEMOCRACY 166

ing the discouraging spectacle from Washington, found in this boister
ous election "a revolution in the habits and manners of the people." 4
The process set in motion decades earlier, and poignantly symbolized
by his own expulsion from the White House in 1829, had reached its
fulfillment. "This appears to be the first time in our history," Morgan
Dix commented, "in which a direct appeal was made to the lower
classes by exciting their curiosity, feeding the desire for amusement,
and presenting what is low and vulgar as an inducement for support.
Since that day the thing has been carried farther, until it is actually a
disadvantage to be of good stock and to have inherited the grand old
name of gentleman/ " 5

The withdrawal of the soberer classes from politics went on, hastened
by the new fevers aroused by slavery and sectional animosities. As
early as 1835 Tocqueville had commented on the "vulgar demeanor"
and the obscurity of the members of the House; he would have found
the deterioration quite advanced, had he returned in the 1850*5. "Do
you remark," wrote Secretary of the Navy John Pendleton Kennedy to
his uncle in the 1850 $, "how lamentably destitute the country is of
men in public station of whom we may speak with any pride? . . .
How completely has the conception and estimate of a gentleman been
obliterated from the popular mind! Whatever of that character we
have seems almost banished from the stage/* 6 In 1850, Francis Bowen,
writing in the North American Review., found that both Houses of
Congress had been "transformed into noisy and quarrelsome debating
clubs." 7

Furious menaces and bellowing exaggeration take the place of
calm and dignified debate; the halls of the capitol often present
scenes which would disgrace a bear-garden; and Congress attains
the unenviable fame of being the most helpless, disorderly, and in
efficient legislative body which can be found in the civilized world.

4 For this campaign and the quotations, see Robert G. Gunderson: The Log-
Cabin Campaign (Lexington, 1957), especially pp. 3, 7, 101-7, 134, 1612, 179-86,
i 18.

5 Memoirs of John A. Dix ( New York, 1883 ) , Vol. I, p, 165.

6 Henry T. Tuckerman: Life of John Pendleton Kennedy (New York, 1871),
p. 187.

7 "The Action of Congress on the California and Territorial Questions/* North
American Review, Vol. LXXI ( July, 1850 ) , pp. 2,2,4-64.

167 The Decline of the Gentleman

Representative Robert Toombs of Georgia concurred, The present
Congress, he wrote to a friend, "furnishes the worst specimens of
legislators I have ever seen here. . . . There is a large infusion of suc
cessful jobbers, lucky serving men ? parishless parsons and itinerant
lecturers among them who are not only without wisdom or knowledge
but have bad manners, and therefore we can have but little hope of
good legislation." s By 1853 ft was deemed necessary to forbid Con
gressmen by law to take compensation for prosecuting any claim
against the government, and to prescribe penalties against bribery. 9
Deterioration reached the point of outright helplessness in 1859, when
the House found itself almost unable to agree on a Speaker. Young
Charles Francis Adams was in Washington that year visiting his father,
who was then a Congressman. As he later recalled: x

I remember very well the Senate and House at that time. Nei
ther body impressed me. The House was a national bear-garden;
for that was, much more than now, a period of the unpicturesque
frontiersman and the overseer. Sectional feeling ran high, and bad
manners were conspicuously in evidence; whiskey, expectoration
and bowie-knives were the order of that day. They were, indeed,
the only land of Border" observed in the House, over which poor
old Pennington, of New Jersey, had as a last recourse been chosen
to preside, probably the most wholly and all-round incompetent
Speaker the House ever had.

In the earlier days of the Republic it had been possible for men in
high places to add to their ranks with confidence other men of talents
and distinction. This process was not as undemocratic as it may sound,
since those who were thus co-opted were often men without advan-

8 U. B. Phillips, ed.: The Correspondence of Robert Toombs y Alexander H.
Stephens, and HoweU Cobb, American Historical Association Annual Report, 1911,
Vol. II, p. 188.

9 Leonard D. White; The Jacksonians, p. 27. On deterioration in Congress and
the public service, see pp. 257, 325-32, 343-6, 398-9, 411420.

1 An Autobiography (Boston, 1916) pp. 434. This was, of course, only a few
years after the famous assault on Smrrner by Brooks; during the same year a
Congressman shot and killed a waiter out of annoyance with hotel dining-room
service in Washington. On the state of Congress in the 1850*8, see Roy F. Nichols:
The Disruption of American Democracy (New York, 1948), pp. 23, 68, 188-91,
273-6, 284-7, 331-2. On the background of governmental decline, David Donald s
Harmsworth Inaugural Lecture, "An Excess of Democracy: The American Civil
War and the Social Process" (Oxford, 1960), is most stimulating. The decline of
political leadership in the South has been particularly well traced in Clement
Eaton: Freedom of Thought in the Old South (Durham, 1940), and Charles S.
Sydnor: The Development of Southern Sectionalism,. 1819-1848 (Baton Rouge,
1948), especially chapter 12.

THE POLITICS OF DEMOCRACY 168

tages of birth and wealth. In 1808 It had been possible, for instance, for
President Jefferson to write to William Wirt, a distinguished lawyer
and essayist who had been born the son of an immigrant tavern-
keeper, the following letter: 2

The object of this letter ... is to propose to you to come into
Congress. That is the great commanding theatre of this nation, and
the threshold to whatever department or office a man is qualified
to enter. With your reputation, talents, and correct views, used
with the necessary prudence, you ttfiZZ at once be placed at the
head of the republican body in the House of Representatives; and
after obtaining the standing which a little time will ensure you,
you may look, at your own will, into the military, the judiciary, the
diplomatic, or other civil departments, tvith a certainty of being in
either whatever you please. And in the present state of "what may
be called the eminent talents of our country, you may be assured
of being engaged through life in the most honourable employ
ments.

A few years after Jefferson s death, the confident assumptions of this
letter were no longer conceivable. The techniques of advancement
had changed; the qualities that put an aspiring politician into rapport
with the public became more important than those that impressed his
peers or superiors. More men were pushed up from the bottom than
selected from the top.

The change in the standards of elected personnel was paralleled by
the fate of the public service. The first tradition of the American civil
service, established for the Federalists by Washington and continued
by both Federalists and Jeffersonians until 1829, was a tradition of
government by gentlemen. 3 By contemporary European standards of
administration, Washington s initial criteria for appointments to Fed
eral offices, although partisan, had been high. He demanded compe
tence, and he also placed much emphasis both on the public repute and
on the personal integrity of his appointees, in the hope that to name

2 Writings, edited by Bergh, Vol. XI (Washington, 1904), pp. 42,34; italics are
mine.

3 My conclusions with regard to the history of the civil service have followed
Leonard D. White s invaluable histories: The Federalists (New York, 1948), The
Jeffersonians (New York, 1951), The Jacksonians, already cited, and The Republi
can Era 1869-1901 (New York, 1958). Paul P. Van Riper, in his History of the
United States Civil Service (Evanston, Illinois, 1958), p. 11, remarks: "During the
formative years of the American national government its public service was one of
the most competent in the world. Certainly it was one of the freest from comrp-
ticm." *

169 The Decline of the Gentleman

"such men as I conceive -would give dignity and lustre to our National
Character" would strengthen the new government. The impersonal
principle of geographical distribution of appointments was observed
from the beginning, but nepotism was ruled out. By 1792 political al
legiance began to play more of a role in appointments, but it was still a
modest role, as indicated by the remark of Washington s successor,
John Adams, that the first President had appointed "a multitude of
democrats and jacobins of the deepest die." 4 The greatest obstacle to
recruitment into public service was that rural opinion kept federal
salaries low, and from the beginning the prestige of public service was
not high enough to be consistently attractive, even to men chosen for
cabinet posts. When the Jeffersonians replaced the Federalists, Jef
ferson tried partly to calm the political hysteria of the previous years
by avoiding wholesale public-service removals for political reasons
alone; the most outspoken, intransigent, and active Federalist office
holders were fired, but the quieter ones retained their jobs. The caliber
of public officers remained the same, although Jefferson advanced the
idea that the offices should be more or less equally divided between the
parties. The old criteria of integrity and respectability prevailed, and
whatever else may be said about Jefferson s "Revolution of 1800," it
brought no revolution in administrative practice. Indeed, in this re
spect, the remarkable thing was the continuity of criteria for choosing
personnel. 5

In the meantime, however, partisan use of patronage was becoming
standard practice in some states, notably in Pennsylvania and New
York. The idea of rotation in office spread from elective to appointive
positions. With the rise of universal suffrage and egalitarian passions,
older traditions of administration gave way during the iSzo s to a more
candid use of patronage for partisan purposes. The principle of rota
tion in office, which was considered the proper democratic creed, was
looked upon by Jacksonians not as a possible cause of the deteriora
tion of administrative personnel but rather as a social reform. Jack
sonians saw the opportunity to gain office as yet another opportunity

4 John Adams: Works (Boston, 1854), Vol. IX, p. 87. This was not said in com
plete disapproval. Adams himself did not propose to proscribe the opposition, lest
he exclude "some of the ablest, most influential., and best characters in the Union/

5 Van Riper remarks that, so far as partisanship is concerned, Jefferson pro
scribed enough public employees to be considered, as much as Jackson, the founder
of the national spoils system, but that, so far as the caliber and social type of ap
pointees are concerned, neither he nor his chief associates "made any real indenta
tion on the essentially upper-class nature of the federal civil service/* Op. cit.,
p. 2,3.

THE POLITICS OF DEMOCRACY 170

available to the common man in an open society. The rotation of office
holders, they held, would malce it impossible for an undemocratic,
permanent officeholding class to emerge. Easy removals and easy ac
cess to vacancies were not considered administrative -weaknesses but
democratic merits. This conception was expressed most authorita
tively by Andrew Jackson in his first annual message to Congress in
December, 1829.

Jackson argued that even when personal integrity made corruption
unthinkable, men who enjoyed long tenure in office would develop
habits of mind unfavorable to the public interest. Among long-standing
officeholders, ^office is considered as a species of property, and govern
ment rather as a means of promoting individual interests than as an
instrument created for the service of the people." Sooner or later,
whether by outright corruption or by the "perversion of correct feelings
and principles/ government is diverted from its legitimate ends to
become "an engine for the support of the few at the expense of the
many." The President was not troubled by the thought of the numbers
of inexperienced and untried men that rotation would periodically
bring. "The duties of all public officers are, or least admit of being
made, so plain and simple that men of intelligence may readily qualify
themselves for their performance"; and more would be lost by keep
ing men in office for long periods than would be gained as a result of
their experience. In this, and in other passages, one sees Jackson s de
termination to keep offices open to newcomers as a part of the demo
cratic pattern of opportunity, and to break down the notion that of
fices were a form of property. The idea of rotation in office he
considered "a leading principle in the republican creed/* 6

The issue was clearly drawn: offices were in fact regarded by all as
a kind of property, but the Jacksonians believed in sharing such prop
erty. Their approach to public offices was a perfect analogue of their
anti-monopolistic position on economic matters. In a society -whose
energy and vitality owed so much to the diffusion of political and eco
nomic opportunities, there may have been more latent wisdom in this
than Jackson s opponents were willing to admit. But the Jacksonian
conviction that the duties of government were so simple that almost

6 J. D. Richardson, ed.: Messages and Papers of the Presidents (New York,
1897 ), Vol. Ill, pp. 1011 is. Several historians have pointed out that the actual
numher of Jackson s removals was not very great. His administration was perhaps
more notable for providing a rationale for removals. In later years, addiction to the
spoils system became so acute that it invaded the factions within the parties. In the
1850*8 the Buchanan Democrats were throwing out the Pierce Democrats.

The Decline of the Gentleman

anyone could execute them downgraded the functions of the expert
and the trained man to a degree which turned insidious when the
functions of government became complex. 7 Just as the gentleman was
being elbowed out of the way by the homely necessities of American
elections, the expert, even the merely competent man, was being
restricted by the demands of the party system and the creed of rotation
into a sharply limited place in the American political system. The
estrangement of training and intellect from the power to decide and to
manage had been completed. The place of intellect in public life had,
unfortunately, been made dependent upon the gentleman s regard for
education and training and had been linked too closely to his political
fortunes. In nineteenth-century America this was a losing cause.

7 In fact, the principle of rotation could not be quite so fully realized as
Jacksonian pronunciamentos suggested. What emerged -was what Leonard D.
White has called a "dual system/* in which, a patronage system and a career
system existed side by side. Patronage clerks came and went, while a certain core of
more permanent officers remained. See The Jacksonians, pp. 34762.

[ 172 ]

CHAPTER VII

The Fate of the Reformer

B

mid-century, the gentlemen had been reduced to a marginal
role in both elective and appointive offices in the United States, and
had been substantially alienated from American politics. For a time
the Civil War submerged their discontents. The war was one of those
major crises that suspend cultural criticism. It was a cause, a distrac
tion, a task that urgently had to be done, and, on the whole, North
erners of the patrician class rallied to the support of their country
without asking whether the political culture they proposed to save was
worth saving. Lincoln, as they came to know him, was reassuring, and
he pleased them by appointing men of learning and letters to diplo
matic posts Charles Francis Adams, Sr., John Bigelow, George Wil
liam Curtis, William Dean Howells, and John Lothrop Motley. If
American democratic culture could produce such a man, it was pos
sible that they, after all, had underestimated it.

But when the war was over, the failure of the system seemed only
to have been dramatized. Hundreds of thousands of lives had been lost
to redeem the political failures of the pre-war generation, and during
the terrible fiasco of Reconstruction, it became clear that beyond the
minimal goal of saving the Union nothing had been accomplished and
nothing learned. The new generation of entrepreneurs was more vora
cious than the old, and politics appeared to have been abandoned to
bloody-shirt demagogy, to dispensing the public domain to railroad
barons, and to the tariff swindle. The idealistic Republican Party of
1856 had become the party of men like Benjamin F. Butler and Ben

173 The Fate of the Reformer

Wade, and the creature of the scandalmakers of the Grant administra
tion.

Many reformers saw how the tide of events was running as early as
1868, when Richard Henry Dana, Jr., tried to oust Benjamin F. Butler
from his Massachusetts Congressional seat. For them the issue was
sharply drawn: in the Bay State, the heart and center of the Brah
min class and the moral and intellectual wellspring of the patrician
type, one of their own kind was now trying to remove from the political
scene the man who had become the pre-eminent symbol of candid
cynicism in politics. This was, The New York Times thought, "a contest
between the intelligent, sober-minded, reflective men of the district,
and the unthinking, reckless, boisterous don*t-care-a-damnative portion
of the community/ * It proved also to be a contest between a tiny
minority and the overwhelming majority of the immigrants and work
ers, marked by the almost classic ineptitude of Dana s electioneering
techniques. 2 The dismal prospects of men of Dana s kind were harshly
clarified by the election; Dana got less than ten per cent of the votes.

The humiliation of Dana was the first of a series of shocks. The re
formers friends were faring badly. Motley, on the strength of a rumor,
was forced out of his diplomatic post by Andrew Johnson; reappointed
by Grant, he was ditched once again because Grant wanted to strike
through him at Sumner. Judge Ebenezer R. Hoar s nomination for
the Supreme Court was rejected mainly because the politicians didn t
like him. ("What could you expect/ asked Simon Cameron, "from a
man who had snubbed seventy Senators?") The able economist,
David A. Wells, was cut out of his office as special revenue agent be
cause of his free-trade views. Jacob Dolson Cox, a leading advocate of
civil-service reform, felt impelled by lack of presidential support to re
sign as Grant s Secretary of the Interior. By 1870, Henry Adams, ex
plaining why he had left Washington to teach at Harvard, wrote: "All
my friends have been or are on the point of being driven out of the

1 The New York Times, October 2,4, 1868. For years Butler used the Brahmins
hatred of him as a political asset. A supporter in 1884 declared that he won
elections because "all the snobs and all the dilettantes hate him, and Harvard
College won t make him a doctor of laws. * H. C. Thomas: Return of the
Democratic Party to Power in 1884 (New York, 1919), p. 139.

2 It was in this campaign that Butler, driving a wedge between Dana and
working-class constituencies, accused Dana of wearing white gloves. Dana ad
mitted that he did at times wear white gloves and clean clothes, but assured his
audience, the workingmen of Lynn, that when he spent two years before the mast
as a young sailor, "I was as dirty as any of you." Benjamin F. Butler: Butler s Book
(Boston, 1892), pp.

THE POLITICS OF DEMOCRACY

174

government and I should have been left without any allies or sources
of information." 3

The young men who had hoped that the party of Lincoln and Grant
might bring about a reform no longer had any illusions. As the grim
shape of the new America emerged out of the smoke of the war, there
emerged with it a peculiar American underground of frustrated aristo
crats, a type of genteel reformer whose very existence dramatized the
alienation of education and intellect from significant political and
economic power. The dominant idea of the genteel reformers was
public service; their chief issue, civil-service reform; their theoretical
spokesman, E. L. Godkin of the Nation; their most successful political
hero, Grover Cleveland. Their towering literary monument proved to
be that masterpiece in the artistry of self-pity, Henry Adams s Educa
tion.

The historian, looking back upon the genteel reformers and realizing
how many grave social issues they barely touched upon and how many
they did not touch at all, may be inclined to feel that their blood ran
thin, and to welcome the appearance among them in later days of such
a bold and distracted figure as John Jay Chapman. But this class rep
resented the majority of the politically active educated men of the
community; and the place of mind in American politics, if mind was to
have any place at all, rested mainly upon their fortunes. This they
understood themselves; it was what Lowell meant when he begged
Godkin to protest in the Nation against "the queer notion of the Repub
lican Party that they can get along without their brains" and Charles
Eliot Norton when he made his pathetic if rather parochial plaint
that "the Nation & Harvard & Yale College seem to me almost the only
solid barriers against the invasion of modern barbarism & vulgarity." 4
The reform type was not national or representative. As a rule, the
genteel reformers were born in the Northeast mainly in Massachu
setts, Connecticut, New York, and Pennsylvania although a scattered
few lived in those parts of the Middle West which had been colonized
by Yankees and New Yorkers. Morally and intellectually these men
were the heirs of New England, and for the most part its heirs by

3 Adams to C. M. Gaskell, October 25, 1870, in W. C. Ford, ed.: Letters of
Henry Adams (Boston, 1930), p. 196.

4 J. R. Lowell to Godkin, December 20, 1871, in Rollo Ogden, ed.: Life and
Letters of Edwin Lawrence Godkin (New York, 1907), Vol. II, p. 87; C. E. Norton
to Godkin, November 3, 1871, in Ari Hoogenboom: Outlawing the Spoils
( Urbana, Illinois, 1961 ) , p. 99.

175 The Fate of the Reformer

descent. They carried on the philosophical concerns of Unitarianism
and transcendentalism, the moral animus of Puritanism, the crusading
heritage of the free-soil movement, the New England reverence for
education and intellectualism, the Yankee passion for public duty and
civic reform.

They struck the Yankee note, one must add, of self-confidence and
self -righteousness; most of the genteel reformers were certain of their
own moral purity. "Each generation of citizens/ 7 declared the publisher
George Haven Putnam, describing them in his autobiography, "pro
duces a group of men who are free from self-seeking and who, recog
nizing their obligations to the community, are prepared to give their
work and their capacities for doing what may be in their power for the
service of their fellow-men." 5 This capacity for disinterested service
was founded upon financial security and firm family traditions. The
genteel reformers were not usually very rich, but they were almost in
variably well-to-do. Hardly any were self-made men from obscure or
poverty-stricken homes; they were the sons of established merchants
and manufacturers, lawyers, clergymen, physicians, educators, editors,
journalists, and publishers, and they had followed their fathers into
business and the professions. Their education was far above the ordi
nary: at a time when college diplomas were still rare, there were among
them an impressive number with B.A/s, and most of those who lacked
B.A/s had law degrees. Several were historians, antiquarians, and col
lectors; others wrote poetry, fiction, or criticism. A high proportion of
the college men had gone to Harvard or Yale, or to such outposts of the
New England educational tradition as Amherst, Brown, Williams,
Dartmouth, and Oberlin. Those whose religious affiliations can be
determined belonged ( aside from a few independents and skeptics ) to
the upper-class denominations, and especially those most affected by
the New England tradition or those which appealed to mercantile
patricians Congregationalists, Unitarians, and Episcopalians. 6

Politically and morally, as Henry Adams so poignantly demonstrated,

5 George Haven Putnam: Memories of a Publisher (New York, 1915), p. 112.

6 My generalizations about the reformers are based on an analysis of factors in
the careers of 191 men in an unpublished master s essay at Columbia University
written by James Stuart McLachlan: The Genteel Reformers; 18651884 (1958).
His conclusions are similar to those in Ari Hoogenboom s analysis of civil-service
reformers, op. cit., pp. 190-7. Cf. his essay, "An Analysis of Civil Service Re
formers," The Historian, Vol. XXIII (November, 1960), pp. 54-78. Paul P. Van
Riper emphasizes the prior abolitionist sympathies of these reformers, and their
preoccupation with individual liberty and political morality; op. cit., pp. 78-86.

THE POLITICS OF DEMOCRACY 176

the genteel reformers -were homeless. They had few friends and no
allies* Almost everywhere in American life in business as -well as in
politics an ingenuous but coarse and ruthless type of person had taken
over control of affairs, a type Adams found in possession -when he re
turned to Washington from England after the Civil War: 7

In time one came to recognize the type in other men [than
Grant], with differences and variations, as normal; men whose
energies were the greater, the less they wasted on thought; men
who sprang from the soil to power; apt to be distrustful of them
selves and of others; shy; jealous, sometimes vindictive; more or
less dull in outward appearance, always needing stimulants; hut
for whom action was the highest stimulant the instinct of fight.
Such men were forces of nature, energies of the prime, like the
Pteraspis, but they made short work of scholars. They had com
manded thousands of such and saw no more in them than in
others. The fact was certain; it crushed argument and intellect at
once.

Wherever men of cultivation looked, they found themselves facing
hostile forces and an alien mentality. They resented the new plutocracy
which overshadowed them in business and in public affairs a plu
tocracy they considered as dangerous socially as it was personally vul
gar and ostentatious; for it consisted of those tycoons about whom
Charles Francis Adams, Jr., said that after years of association he had
not met one that he would ever care to meet again, or one that could be
"associated in my mind with the idea of humor, thought or refine
ment." 8 No less vulgar were the politicians "lewd f ellows of the baser
sort," Godkin called them * who compounded their vulgarity with in
efficiency, ignorance, and corruption. Henry Adams had not long re
turned to Washington when a Cabinet officer told him how pointless
it was to show patience in dealing with Congressmen: "You can t use
tact with a Congressman! A Congressman is a hog! You must take a
stick and hit him on the snout! 3 Everyone in Boston, New England, and
New York agreed in warning Adams that "Washington was no place
for a respectable young man/* and he could see for himself that the

7 The Education of Henry Adams (New York: Modern Library edition; 1931),
p- 265.

8 Charles Francis Adams: An Autobiography ( Boston, 1916), p. 190.

9 E. L. Godkin: "The Main Question," Nation, Vol. IX (October 14, 1869),

177 The Fate of the Reformer

place had no tone, no society, no social medium through which the
ideas of men of discernment and refinement could influence affairs. 1

Society seemed hardly more at home than he. Both Executive
and Congress held it aloof. No one in society seemed to have the
ear of anybody in Government. No one in Government knew any
reason for consulting any one in society. The "world had ceased to
be wholly political, but politics had become less social. A survi
vor of the Civil War like George Bancroft, or John Hay tried to
keep footing, but without brilliant success. They were free to do or
say what they liked, but no one took much notice of anything said
or done.

The genteel reformers were as much alienated from the general pub
lic as they were from the main centers of power in the business corpo
rations and the political machines. They had too much at stake in
society to campaign for radical changes and too much disdain for other
varieties of reformers to make political allies. The discontented farm
ers, with their cranky enthusiasms and their monetary panaceas, in
spired in them only distaste. Snobbishness and gentility, as well as
class interest, estranged them from the working class and the im
migrants. Charles Francis Adams, Jr., expressed a feeling common to
his class when he said: "I don t associate with the laborers on my place";
and he was no doubt doubly right when he added that such association
would not be "agreeable to either of us." 2 As for the immigrants, the
reformers considered their role in the misgovernment of cities to be one
of the chief sources of the strength of the bosses. Reformers were some
times skeptical about the merits of unrestricted democracy and univer
sal manhood suffrage, and toyed with the thought of education tests or
poll taxes that would disfranchise the most ignorant in the electorate. 3

Thus estranged from major social interests "which had different
needs from their own, the genteel reformers were barred from useful
political alliances and condemned to political ineffectuality. They had

1 Adams: Education, pp. 261, 296, 320. Cf. James Bryce: "Why the Best Men
Do Not Go into Politics/* The American Commonwealth (New York, 1897),
Vol. II, chapter 57.

2 Autobiography, pp. 1516.

3 See "The Government of our Great Cities," Nation, Vol. Ill (October 18,
1866), pp. 312-13; North American Review, Vol. CIII (October, 1866), pp. 413-
65; Arthur F. Beringause: Brooks Adams (New York, 1955 )> PP- 60, 67;
Barbara M. Solomon: Ancestors and Immigrants (Cambridge, Mass., 1956). On
the outlook of the reformers, see Geoffrey T. Blodgett s sensitive account of "The
Mind of the Boston Mugwump," Mississippi Valley Historical Review, Vol.
XL VIII (March, 1962), pp. 614-34.

THE POLITICS OF DEMOCRACY 178

to content themselves with the hope that occasionally they could get
their way by acting "on the limited number o cultivated minds/* 4 by
appealing, as James Ford Rhodes put it, to men of "property and intel
ligence." "We want a government/* said Carl Schurz in 1874, "which
the best people of this country will be proud of." 5 What they were
really asking for was leadership by an educated and civic-minded
elite in a country which had no use for elites of any kind, much less
for an educated one. "The best people" were outsiders. Their social
position seemed a liability; their education certainly was. In 1888
James Russell Lowell complained that "in the opinion of some of our
leading politicians and many of our newspapers, men of scholarly
minds are ipso facto debarred from forming any judgment on public
affairs; or if they should be so unscrupulous as to do so ... they must
at least refrain from communicating it to their fellow-citizens." 6

Aware that their public following was too small to admit of a frontal
attack on any major citadel of politics or administration, the genteel
reformers were driven to adopt a strategy of independency. The margin
of strength between the two major parties was frequently so narrow
that, by threatening to bolt, a strong faction of independents might win
an influence out of proportion to their numbers. 7 For a short time, the
reformers seemed to be poised tantalizingly on the fringes of real in
fluence. At first, they thought they might have some say in the Grant
administration, and when Grant disappointed them, most of them took
part in the ill-fated bolt of the Liberal Republicans in 1872. Then they
were courted so carefully by Hayes that their expectations were
aroused, only to be disappointed again. For the most part, they had to
content themselves with limited victories, like the reform of the post

4 Adams to Gaskell, quoted in Ernest Samuels: The Young Henry Adams
(Cambridge, Mass., 1948), p. 182. C. Putnam s view: "It was our hope that as the
youngsters came out of college from year to year with the land of knowledge of the
history of economics that would be given to them by professors like William
Graham Sumner of Yale, we should gradually secure a larger hold on public
opinion, and through the influence of leaders bring the mass of the voters to an
understanding of their own business interests." Putnam: op. cit., pp. 423.

5 Quoted in Eric Goldman: Rendezvous with Destiny (New York, 1952), p. 2.4.
One advocate of civil-service reform pointed out that in "the early days of the
Republic" all public servants from cabinet officers down to subordinate members
"were generally selected from well-known families," and argued that civil-service
reform would reintroduce this practice. Julius Bing: "Civil Service of the United
States/ 7 North American Review, Vol. CV ( October, 1867), pp. 4801.

6 "The Place of the Independent in Politics," Writings, Vol. VI ( Cambridge,
Mass., 1890), p. 190.

7 On the strategy of independency, see James Russell Lowell: "The Place of the
Independent in Politics," pp. 190 &.; and E. McChing Fleming: R. R, Bowker,
Militant Liberal (New York, 1952), pp. 103-8.

179 The Fate of the Reformer

office and the New York Customs House, or the occasional appoint
ment of such men as Hamilton Fish, E. R. Hoar, William M. Evarts,
Carl Schurz, or Wayne MacVeagh, to Cabinet posts. Their happiest
moment came in the election of 1884, when they convinced them
selves that the Mugwump bolt from the Republican Party had swung
the state of New York from Elaine to Cleveland, and with it the elec
tion. But their outstanding legislative success was in civil-service re
form, with the passage of the Pendleton Act in 1883. This deserves
special attention, for civil-service reform, the class issue of the gentle
man, was a touchstone of American political culture.

The central idea of the reformers the idea -which they all agreed upon
and which excited their deepest concern was the improvement of the
civil service, without which they believed no other reform could be
successfully carried out. 8 The ideal of civil-service reform brought into
direct opposition the credo of the professional politicians, who put then-
faith in party organisation and party rewards and the practice of rota
tion in office, and the ideals of the reformers, who wanted competence,
efficiency, and economy in the public service, open competition for
jobs on the basis of merit, and security of tenure. The reformers looked
to various models for their proposals to the American military serv
ices, to bureaucratic systems in Prussia or even China; but principally
this English-oriented intellectual class looked for inspiration to Eng
land, where civil-service reorganization had been under way since the
publication of the Northcote-Trevelyan Report in 1854.

The English civil-service reformers had designed their proposals in
full awareness of the organic relation of the civil service to the class
structure and to the educational system. They had planned a civil serv
ice which, as Gladstone observed, would give the gentlemanly classes
"command over all the higher posts" and allot to members of the lower
classes the positions that could be filled by persons with more practical
and less expensive training. 9 The scheme owed much to the influence
of Lord Macaulay, who conceived of "a public service confined in its
upper reaches to gentlemen of breeding and culture selected by a liter
ary competition." The higher posts would be filled by gentlemen who

8 On the centrality o this reform, see Paul P. Van Riper: op. cit., pp. 834.

9 See J. Donald Kingsley: Representative Bureaucracy. An Interpretation of the
British Civil Service (Yellow Springs, Ohio, 1944), pp. 6871 and passim.

POLITICS OF DEMOCRACY xSo

had received a rigorous classical training at one of the ancient univer
sities, the lower posts by candidates with a less exalted education
and within each category recruitment by competitive examination
would guarantee the merit of those chosen. By 1877, Sir Charles
Trevelyan, one of the leading reformers, reported to an American
friend that the British changes had been not only successful but popu
lar. "Large as the number of persons who profited by the former system
of patronage were," he observed,

those who were left out in the cold were still larger, and these
included some of the best classes of our population busy profes
sional persons of every kind, lawyers, ministers of religion of
every persuasion, schoolmasters, farmers, shopkeepers, etc. These
rapidly took in the idea of the new institution, and they gladly ac
cepted it as a valuable additional privilege.

Moreover, Sir Charles remarked, the same change that had increased
the efficiency of the civil and military services lias given a marvellous
stimulus to education." Formerly, upper-class boys who intended to go
into public service had had no inducement to exert themselves be
cause they were certain to get an appointment. Now they knew that
their future depended in some good measure upon their own energies,
and "a new spirit of activity has supervened. The opening of the civil
and military services, in its influence upon national education, is
equivalent to a hundred thousand scholarships and exhibitions of the
most valuable kind. . . ." a

The appeal of the British reformers to their American counterparts
is quite understandable. The concern of the leading American re
formers was not, for the most part, self-interested, in so far as most
jobs that would be opened in the American civil service, if competitive
examinations were adopted, would not be of sufficient rank to attract
them. 2 But it was humiliating to know that by the canons of the society
in which they lived they were not preferred for office and could not

1 Sir Charles Trevelyan to Dorman B. Eaton, August 20, 1877, in Donnan B.
Eaton: Civil Service in Great Britain: A History of Abuses and Reforms and Their
Bearing upon American Politics ( New York, 1880 ) , pp. 430-2.

2 No doubt many reformers hoped wistfully that the kind of recognition
Lincoln had given to literary men might be resumed, but such posts were above
and outside the civil-service system. Characteristically, the reformers aspired to
elective rather than appointive office. About half of the leading reformers held
office at one time or another, but chiefly in elective positions. A few went to
Congress, but most of their elected offices were in state legislatures. McLachlan:
op. cit., p. 25.

i8i The Fate of the Reformer

help their friends. 3 What was mainly at issue for them was a cultural
and political ideal, a projection of their own standards of purity and
excellence into governmental practice. It was the "national character"
which was at stake. The principles of freedom and competitive superi
ority which they had learned in their college courses in classical eco
nomics and had applied to the tariff question ought to be applied to
public office: open competition on the basis of merit should be the
civil-service analogue of fair competition in industry. 4 But to the pro
fessional politicians the means of determining merit the competitive
examination seemed to have about it the aura of the school, and it in
stantly aroused their hostility to intellect, education, and training. It
was, as they began to say, a "schoolmaster^ test/ Touching the profes
sions directly on a sensitive nerve, the issue brought forth a violent
reaction which opened the floodgates of anti-intellectualist demagogy.
The professionals denounced the idea of a civil service based upon
examinations and providing secure tenure as aristocratic and imitative
of British, Prussian, and Chinese bureaucracies; as deferential to
monarchical institutions, and a threat to republicanism; and as mili
taristic because it took as one of its models the examination require
ments that had been instituted in the armed services. From the first,
the distrust of trained intellect was invoked. When a bill calling
for civil-service reform was introduced in 1868 by Representative
Thomas A. Jenckes of Rhode Island, it was denounced in the House by
John A. Logan of Illinois in these terms: 5

This bill is the opening \vedge to an aristocracy in this country.
... It will lead us to the point where there will be two national

3 Consider the implications of Henry Adams s letter to Charles Francis
Adams, Jr., April 29, 1869: "I can t get you an office. The only members of this
Government that I have met axe mere acquaintances, not friends., and I fancy no
request of mine would be likely to call out a gush of sympathy. [David Ames]
Wells has just about as much, influence as I have. He can t even protect his own
clerks. Judge Hoar has his hands full, and does not interfere with his colleagues.
. . "Letters, p. 157.

4 There was an assumption on the part of some that social standing would count,
however, in the competition for jobs. Carl Schurz once proposed that "mere
inquiries concerning the character, antecedents, social standing, and general
ability [of a candidate] may be substituted for formal examination. Hoogenrjoom:
op. cit., p. 115.

5 Congressional Globe, 4oth Congress, 3rd session, p. 265 (January 8, 1869). It
is suggestive that competitive civil service, so often criticized in the United States
as undemocratic, was at times assailed in Britain as excessively democratic, and as
throwing the aristocracy on the defensive in the competition for posts. Kiagsley:
op. cit., p. 62,. Others felt that this would only raise the morale and tone of the
class of gentlemen. Cf. Asa Briggs: Victorian People (London, 1954), pp.
1701.

THE POLITICS OF DEMOCRACY

schools in this country one for the military and the other for
civil education. These schools will monopolize all avenues o ap
proach to the Government. Unless a man can pass one or another
of these schools and be enrolled upon their lists he cannot receive
employment tinder this Government, no matter how great may be
his capacity, how indisputable may be his qualifications. When
once he does pass his school and fixes himself for life his next care
will be to get his children there also. In these schools the scholars
will soon come to believe that they are the only persons qualified
to administer the Government, and soon come to resolve that
the Government shall be administered by them and by none
others.

It became clear, as the debate over civil service developed, that the
professionals feared the demand for competence and the requirements
of literacy and intelligence as a threat to the principles upon which the
machines were based, and with this threat before them, there was
almost no limit to the demagogy they would exert in behalf of the
spoils principle. A Congressman from Indiana held up the frightening
prospect that a graduate of, say, Washington College in Virginia, of
which Robert E. Lee was president, would do better on a competitive
examination than a disabled soldier of some "common school or work
shop of the West, who lost a limb at the battle of Chickamauga." The
people, he said, "are not quite ready to permit the students of rebel
colleges, upon competitive examinations and scholastic attainments, to
supersede the disabled and patriotic soldiers of the Republic, who with
fewer educational advantages but larger practical experience are
much better fitted for the position." 6

In similar terms, Senator Matthew H. Carpenter of Wisconsin de
claimed that during the Civil War, 7

6 Congressional Globe, 4^nd Congress, 2nd session, p. 1103 (February 17,
1872). This form of competition with college-trained men also troubled the
veterans* organizations. See Wallace E. Davies: Patriotism on Parade (Cambridge,
Mass., 1955), pp. 2,47, 285-6, 311.

7 Congressional Globe, 4^nd Congress, and session, p. 458 (January 18, 1872).
Many local bosses, of course, were as troubled as the Congressmen about the
effect of competitive examinations on their procedures. **I suppose," objected the
Boston boss, Patrick Macguire, apropos a Massachusetts civil-service law, "that if
any one of my boys wants to have a position in any of the departments of Boston, to
start with I shall have to send him to Harvard College. It is necessary that he
should graduate with the highest honors, and I suppose that the youths who are
now studying there can look forward to the brilliant career that waits for them in
our metropolis when they shall have been educated up to the proper point where

183 The Fate of the Reformer

when the fate o the nation was trembling in the balance, and our
gallant youths were breasting the storm of war, the sons of less
patriotic citizens were enjoying the advantages of a college course.
And now, when our maimed soldiers have returned, and apply
for a Federal office, the duties of which they are perfectly com
petent to discharge, they are to be rejected to give place to those
who were cramming themselves with facts and principles from the
books, while they were bleeding for their country, because they
do not know the fluctuations of the tide at the Cape of Good Hope,
how near the moon ever approaches the earth, or the names of the
principal rivers emptying into the Caspian Sea.

Suggesting that "admission into the kingdom of heaven does not de
pend upon the result of a competitive examination/* the senator rang
the changes on the contrast between formal education and practical
intelligence: "The dunce who has been crammed up to a diploma at
Yale, and comes fresh from his cramming, will be preferred in all civil
appointments to the ablest, most successful, and most upright business
man of the country, who either did not enjoy the benefit of early edu
cation, or from whose mind, long engrossed in practical pursuits., the
details and niceties of academic knowledge have faded away as the
headlands disappear when the mariner bids his native land goodnight."
Such comments were not confined to Northerners who were waving
the bloody shirt. Representative McKee of Mississippi objected that
educational criteria would make it almost impossible for the less edu
cated sections of the country to capitalize on their old privileges under
the geographic criterion for appointment. His complaint, quite candidly
put, was that if competence were to be required he would be unable to
get jobs for his Mississippi constituents. "Suppose," he said, "some wild
mustang girl from New Mexico comes here for a position, and it may
be that she does not know whether the Gulf stream runs north or
south> or perhaps she thinks it stands on end, and she may answer that
the Japan current is closely allied to the English gooseberry, yet al
though competent for the minor position she seeks, she is sent back
home rejected, and the place is given to some spectacled school ma am
who probably has not half as much native sense as the New Mexi
can." 8 McKee complained:

they are able to handle the pick-axe and the shovel, and all others who don t have

the good fortune to be well educated must stand aside and look for positions

elsewhere." Quoted in Lucius B. Swift: Civil Service Reform (n.p., 1885), p. 10.

8 Congressional Globe, 42nd Congress, 3rd session, p. 1631 (February 2,2, 1873).

THE POLITICS OF DEMOCRACY 184

I Lad a constituent here who knew more than your whole civil
service board. He was brought up here from Mississippi and they
found him incompetent for the lowest grade of clerkship; and yet
he is now cashier or teller of one of the largest banks on the Pacific
slope. And they gave the appointment to a spectacled pedagogue
from Maine, who, as far as business capacity and common sense
was concerned, was not fit to be clerk to a boot-black. [Laughter.]
That is the way it has been all along.

For a long time the opponents of civil service succeeded in creating
in the public mind a conception of civil-service reform which had very
little to do with reality but which appealed formidably to egalitarian
sentiments, machine cupidity, and anti-intellectualism. E. L. Godkin
once remarked that when reform agitation first appeared, it was
greeted as simply another of "the thousand visionary attempts to re
generate society with which a certain class of literary men is supposed
to beguile its leisure/* In the inner political circles, between 1868 and
1878, it was known, with much mingled disgust and amusement, as
"snivel service reform/ "The reformers were sometimes spoken of as a
species of millennarians, and others as weak-minded people, who
looked at political society as a sort of Sunday-school which could be
managed by mild exhortation and cheap prizes, and whom it was the
business of practical men to humor in so far as it could be done harm
lessly, but not to argue with/ 7 9 The professional politicians succeeded
in persuading themselves that civil-service reform meant favoritism to
the college-educated; that it would restrict job-holding to a hereditary
college-educated aristocracy; and that all kinds of unreasonable and
esoteric questions would be asked on civil-service examinations.
(R. R. Bowker protested that "a great deal of nonsense [is] talked and
written about asking a man who had to clean streets questions about
ancient history, astronomy, and Sanskrit/ ) The idea of a literate com
petitive examination filled the anti-reformers with horror, a horror
doubtless shared by many potential job applicants. "Henceforth/ de
clared one of the more articular opponents of reform, 1

entrance into the civil service is to be through the narrow portal
of competitive examination, practically limiting entry to the
graduates of colleges, thus admitting a Pierce and excluding a

9 E. L. Godkin: "The Civil Service Reform Controversy," North American Re
view, Vol. CXXXIV (April, 1882), pp. 382-3.

1 William M. Dickson: "The New Political Machine/* North American Review,
VoL CXXXIV (January i, 188*), p. 4*.

185 The Fate of the Reformer

Lincoln; the favored few thus admitted remaining for life; exempt,
likewise, from vicissitudes; advancing, likewise, in a regular grada
tion, higher and higher; a class separate from the rest of the
community, and bound together by a common interest and a com
mon subordination to one man, he also the commander-in-chief
of the Army the President of the United States.

In vain did reformers protest that there -was nothing undemocratic
about tests open equally to all applicants, especially since the Ameri
can educational system itself was so democratic, even at the upper
levels. 2 In vain did they reprint the texts of examinations which al
ready existed in order to show that potential clerks were not expected
to be members of the American Philosophical Society or graduates of
the Ivy League colleges. In vain did they produce statistics showing
that, for instance, in the New York Customs House, -where the com
petitive examination system had been used before 1881, only a very
modest proportion of candidates examined or appointed were college
graduates. 3 The grim specter of the educated civil servant haunted the
professionals to the very end. Even after President Garfield s assassi
nation, when public sentiment for civil-service reform rapidly
mounted, his successor, Chester A. Arthur, professed to Congress his
anxiety that civil-service examinations would exalt "mere intellectual
proficiency" above other qualities and that experienced men would be
at a disadvantage in competing with immature college youths. 4 Sena
tor George H. Pendleton, steering the civil-service reform bill through
Congress, found it necessary to reassure the Senate that the system
of examinations did not present only "a scholastic test" unfairly favor
ing the college-bred. 5 Had it not been for the fortuitous shooting of
Garfield, it is likely that the reforms embodied in the Pendleton Act
would have been delayed for almost a generation.

In the attacks made by the reformers on the professional politicians,
one finds a few essential words recurring: ignorant, vulgar , selfish,

2 Andrew D. White: "Do the Spoils Belong to the Victor?" North American
Review, Vol. CXXXIV (February, 1882), p. 129-30.

3 Godkin: "The Civil Service Reform Controversy/* p. 393.

4 J. R. Richardson: Messages and Papers of the Presidents, Vol. X, pp. 46,

48-9.

5 Congressional Record, 47th Congress, and session, pp. 207-8 (December 12,
1882).

THE POLITICS OF DEMOCRACY 186

corrupt. To counter such language, the politicians had to have an
adequate and appealing answer. It was not merely the conduct of the
public debate which was at stake but also their need to salve their
own genuine feelings of outrage. Where rapport with the public was
concerned, the politicians., of course, had a signal advantage. But if
the debate itself were to be accepted in the terms set by the reformers,
the politicians would suffer considerably, Like all men living at the
fringes of politics, and thus freed of the burdens of decision and re
sponsibility, the reformers found it much easier than the professionals
to keep their boasted purity. Most of the reform leaders were men
from established families., with at least moderate wealth and secure
independent vocations of their own, and not directly dependent
upon politics for their livelihood; it was easier for them than for the
professionals to maintain the atmosphere of disinterestedness that they
felt vital to the public service. Besides, they were in fact better
educated and more cultivated men.

The politicians and bosses found their answer in crying down the
superior education and culture of their critics as political liabilities,
and in questioning their adequacy for the difficult and dirty work of
day-to-day politics. As the politicians put it, they, the bosses and
party workers, had to function in the bitter world of reality in which
the common people also had to live and earn their living. This was
not the sphere of morals and ideals, of education and culture: it was
the hard, masculine sphere of business and politics. The reformers,
they said, claimed to be unselfish; but if this was true at all, it was
true only because they were alien commentators upon an area of
life in which they did not have to work and for which in fact they were
unfit. In the hard-driving, competitive, ruthless, materialistic world of
the Gilded Age, to be unselfish suggested not purity but a lack of self,
a lack of capacity for grappling with reality, a lack o assertion, of
masculinity.

Invoking a well-established preconception of the American male,
the politicians argued that culture is impractical and men of culture
are ineffectual, that culture is feminine and cultivated men tend to
be effeminate. Secretly hungry for office and power themselves, and
yet lacking in the requisite understanding of practical necessities, the
reformers took out their resentment upon those who had succeeded.
They were no better than carping and hypocritical censors of office
holders and power-wielders. They were, as James G. Elaine once put
it, "conceited, foolish, vain, without knowledge ... of men. . . .

187 The Fate of the Reformer

They are noisy but not numerous, pharisaical but not practical, ambi
tious but not wise, pretentious but not powerful." 6

The clash between reformers and politicians created in the minds
of the professionals a stereotype of the educated man in politics that
has never died. It is charmingly illustrated in the sayings, recorded
(and perhaps dressed up) by a reporter around the turn of the cen
tury, of a candid practitioner of metropolitan politics, George Wash
ington Plunkitt of Tammany Hall. If Tammany leaders were "all book
worms and college professors/ Plunkitt declared, 7

Tammany might win an election once in four thousand years.
Most of the leaders are plain American citizens, of the people and
near to the people, and they have all the education they need to
whip the dudes who part their name in the middle. ... As for
the common people of the district, I am at home with them at all
times. When I go among them, I don t try to show off my gram
mar, or talk about the Constitution, or how many volts there is in
electricity or make it appear in any way that I am better educated
than they are. They wouldn t stand for that sort of thing.

Again: 8

Some young men think they can learn how to be successful in
politics from books, and they cram their heads with all sorts of
college rot. They couldn t make a bigger mistake. Now, under
stand me, I ain t sayin nothin against colleges. I guess they have
to exist as long as there s bookworms, and I suppose they do some
good in certain ways, but they don t count in politics. In fact, a
young man who has gone through the college course is handi-

6 Gail Hamilton: Biography of James G. Blaine (Norwich, 1895), p. 491. For
a testy attack on literary men and reformers in politics, and their patronizing at
titude toward professionals, see Senator Joseph R. Hawley: Congressional Record,
47th Congress, 2nd session, p. 2,42, ( December 13, 1882 ) .

7 William L. Riordon: PLunkitt of Tammany Hall (1905; ed. New York, 1948),
pp. 601. One is reminded here of the techniques of the delightful Brooklyn Demo
cratic leader Peter McGuiness. Challenged for the leadership of his district during
the early 1920*5 by a college graduate who maintained that the community should
have a man of culture and refinement as its leader, McGuiness dealt with the new
comer "with a line that is a favorite of connoisseurs of political strategy. At the
next meeting McGuiness addressed, he stood silent for a moment, glaring down at
the crowd of shirtsleeved laborers and housewives in Hoover aprons until he had
their attention. Then he bellowed, *A11 of yez that went to Yales or Cornells raise
your right hands. . . . The Yales and Cornells can vote for him. The rest of yez
vote for me/ " Richard Rovere: "The Big Hello/ in The American Establishment
(New York, 1962), p. 36.

8 Ibid., p. 10.

THE POLITICS OF DEMOCRACY 188

capped at the outset. He may succeed in politics, but the chances
are 100 to 1 against him.

It was not enough for the politicians to say that the reformers were
hypocritical and impractical. Their cultivation and fastidious manners
were taken as evidence that these "namby-pamby, goody-goody gentle
men" who "sip cold tea" 9 were deficient in masculinity. They were on
occasion denounced as "political hermaphrodites" (an easy transition
from their uncertain location as to political party to an uncertain loca
tion as to sex). The waspish Senator Ingalls of Kansas, furious at their
lack of party loyalty, once denounced them as "the third sex" "effem
inate without being either masculine or feminine; unable either to
beget or bear; possessing neither fecundity nor virility; endowed with
the contempt of men and the derision of women, and doomed to
sterility, isolation, and extinction." x

From the moment the reformers appeared as an organized force in
the Liberal Republican movement of 1872, they were denounced by
Roscoe Conkling, one of the most flamboyant of the spoilsmen, as a
"convention of idealists and professors and sore-heads." 2 Conkling also
produced one of the classics of American invective, and spelled out
the implications of the charge of deficient masculinity. Conkling s vic
tim was George William Curtis, once a student at the German univer
sities, editor of Harper s and a prominent reformer, the friend of such
men as Bryant, Lowell, and Stunner, and one of the most prominent
advocates of a more aggressive role in politics for educated men* The
occasion was the New York State Republican Convention of 1877,
at which a battle between bosses and reformers over the party organi
zation came to a head. When Conkling s moment came, he asked:
"Who are these men who, in newspapers and elsewhere, are cracking
their whips over Republicans and playing school-master to the Re
publican party and its conscience and convictions?" "Some of them are
the man-milliners, the dilettanti and carpet knights of politics," he

9 A letter to The New York Times, June 17, 1880, quoted by R. R. Bowker:
Nation, Vol. XXXI (July i, 1880 ), p. 10.

1 Congressional Record, 49th. Congress, ist session, p. 2786 (March. 2,6, 1886).
"They have two recognized functions," the senator said of the third sex. "They sing
falsetto, and they are usually selected as the guardians of the seraglios of Oriental
despots/

2 Matthew Josephson: ThePoliticos (New York, 1938), p. 163. Conkling s words
are reminiscent of those of the businessman who objected to economic reformers as
"philanthropists, professors, and Lady Millionaires/* Edward C. Kirkland: Dream
and Thought in the Business Community (Ithaca, 1956 ), p. 2,6.

189 The Fate of the Reformer

went on and the term man-milliners, a reference to the fashion
articles that Curtis s magazine had recently started to publish, evoked
howls of derisive laughter. After denouncing the reformers for parad
ing "their own thin veneering of superior purity/ and ridiculing
their alleged treachery and hypocrisy, their ^rancid, canting self-
righteousness/ he closed with the remark: They forget that parties
are not built by deportment, or by ladies magazines, or by gush. . . /* 3

What Plunkitt later suggested when he referred to "dudes that part
their name in the middle" Conkling here made as clear as it was ad
missible to do. The cultivated character and precise manners of the
reformers suggested that they were effeminate. Culture suggested
feminity; and the editorship of a ladies* magazine proved it in Curtis s
case. The more recent attacks by Senator McCarthy and others upon
the Eastern and English-oriented prep-school personnel of the State
Department, associated with charges of homosexuality, are not an
altogether novel element in the history of American invective. That
the term "man-milliners" was understood in this light by many con
temporaries is suggested by the fact that though the New York
Tribune reported Conlding s speech in full, with the offending word,
Conkling s nephew dropped "man-milliners" from his account of this
incident in the biography of his uncle and substituted asterisks as
though he were omitting an unmistakable obscenity. 4

What the politicians relied upon, as the basis for an unspoken agree
ment about the improper character of the reformers, was the feeling,
then accepted by practically all men and by most women, that to be
active in political life was a male prerogative, in the sense that women
were excluded from it, and further, that capacity for an effective
role in politics was practically a test of masculinity. To be active in
politics was a man s business, whereas to be engaged in reform move
ments (at least in America) meant constant association with aggres
sive, reforming, moralizing women witness the case of the abolition
ists. The common male idea, so often heard in the debate over woman
suffrage, was that women would soil and unsex themselves if they

3 Alfred R. ConHing: Life and Letters of Roscoe Conkling (New York, 1889),
pp. 5401; for the full account of the incident, see pp. 53849-

4 See also the attack on Curtis in the Elmira Advertiser, October 6, 1877, as
reported in Thomas Collier Platt s Autobiography (New York, 1910), pp. 93-5;
Here "a smart boy named Curtis, who parted his hair in the middle like a girl"
and lived in an exclusively feminine environment, ran afoul of a masculine redhead
named ConHing, who beat him up, to the indignation of Curtis s maiden aunts and
all the female neighbors.

THE POLITICS OF DEMOCRACY 190

entered the inevitably dirty male world of political activity, about
which Senator Ingalls once said that its purification was "an iridescent
dream."

If women invaded politics, they would become masculine, just as
men became feminine when they espoused reform. Horace Bush-
nell suggested that if women got the vote and kept it for hundreds of
years, "the very look and temperament of women will be altered."
The appearance of women would be sharp, their bodies wiry, their
voices shrill, their actions angular and abrupt, and full of self-assertion,
will, boldness, and eagerness for place and power. It could also be
expected that in this nightmare of female assertion women would
actually "change type physiologically, they will become taller and
more brawny, and get bigger hands and feet, and a heavier weight of
brain," and would very likely become "thinner, sharp-featured, lank
and dry, just as all disappointed, over-instigated natures always are." 5

In compensation for their political disability, women were always
conceded to embody a far greater moral purity than men ( though this
purity was held to be of a frailer variety); G and it was conventionally
said that they would make it effective in the world through their role
as wives and mothers. So long as they stayed out of politics, the realm
of ideals and of purity belonged to them. By the same token, the
realm of reality and of dirty dealings, in so far as it must exist, be
longed to men; and the reformers who felt that they were bringing
purer and more disinterested personal ideals into politics were ac
cused by their opponents of trying to womanize politics, and to mix
the spheres of the sexes. Just as women unsexed themselves by entering
politics, so reformers unsexed themselves by introducing female
standards i.e., morality into political life. The old byword for re
formers long-haired men and short-haired women" aptly expressed
this popular feeling.

The notion that the demand for women s suffrage was perversely
unsexing, even dehumanizing, was one of the central themes of Henry

5 Horace Bushnell: Women s Suffrage: the Reform against Nature (New York,
1869), pp. 135-6. Cf. p. 56: "The claim of a beard would not be a more radical
revolt against nature/*

6 Cf. Bushnell: "We also know that women often show a strange facility of de
basement and moral abandonment, when they have once given way consentingly.
Men go down by a descent facilis descencus women by a precipitation. Perhaps
the reason is, in part, that more is expected of women and that again because there
is more expectancy of truth and sacrifice in the semi-christly, subject state of
women than is likely to be looked for in the forward, self-asserting headship of
men." Ibid., p .142.

igi The Fate of the Reformer

James s The Bostonians. Like Bushnell, James feared that the male
world would be undone by the perverse aggressiveness o women
and of feminine principles. His Southern hero, Basil Ransom, bursts
out: 7

The whole generation is womanized; the masculine tone is pass
ing out of the world; it s a feminine, a nervous, hysterical, chatter
ing, canting age, an age of hollow phrases and false delicacy and
exaggerated solicitudes and coddled sensibilities, which, if we
don t soon look out, will usher in the reign of mediocrity, of the
feeblest and flattest and the most pretentious that has ever been.
The masculine character, the ability to dare and endure, to know
and yet not fear reality, to look the world in the face and take it
for what it is a very queer and partly very base mixture that is
what I want to preserve, or rather, as I may say, recover. . . .

The world that James had in mind as having already been deprived of
its masculine character was not, surely, the world of Jim Fisk, Car
negie, Rockefeller, or the railroad barons, nor the world of the Tweed
Ring or Roscoe Conkling; rather it was the world of the cultivated
man, whose learning had once been linked with masculine firmness
to the life of action and assertion, the Eastern society, epitomized by
Boston, which in all America James knew best. There seemed to be
an almost painful need in this society for die kind of man who could
join the sphere of ideas and moral scruples with the virile qualities
of action and assertion.

* 4 *

Whether or not the reformers fully realized it, the stigma of effeminacy
and ineffectuality became a handicap to them, a token of their in
sulation from the main currents of American politics. One of the first
to meet this challenge was Theodore Roosevelt. A recruit from the
same social and educational strata as the reform leaders, he decided
at an early age that the deficiencies charged against them were real,
and that if reform was to get anywhere, their type must be replaced
by a new and more vigorous kind of leader from the same class.
In his Autobiography, he recalled that the reformers were 8

gentlemen who were very nice, very refined, who shook their
heads over political corruption and discussed it in drawing-rooms

7 The Bostonians ( 1886; ed. London, 1952), p. 289.

8 An Autobiography ( New York, 1920 ) , pp. 86-7.

THE POLITICS OF DEMOCRACY

and parlors, but who were wholly unable to grapple with real men
in real life. They were apt vociferously to demand "reform** as if
it were some concrete substance, like cake, which could be handed
out at will, in tangible masses, if only the demand were urgent
enough. These parlor reformers made up for inefficiency in action
by zeal in criticizing. . . .

When T. R. wrote this, he had long since been separated from re
formers of Godkin s stripe by an intense and almost obsessive hatred,
occasioned on his side by an irritating sense that they thought of him
as a moral traitor, and on their side by an incomprehension that a
man of his background could have made his moral compromises. But
it was one of the major sources of his popularity in the country at
large, toward the end of the century, that he could be portrayed as an
Easterner, a writer, and a Harvard man from the well-to-do classes
who nevertheless knew how to get along with cowboys and Rough
Riders.

In spite of the disapproval of his family and friends, Roosevelt
entered politics at the bottom in 1880 by joining the Jake Hess
Republican Club near his home in New York City. He persisted in
playing the political game despite his early distaste for the environ
ment and the rebuffs of the ward heelers. The next year he had Avon
enough support within the Republican machine to be sent to the
legislature at Albany. When Roosevelt first entered the New York
Assembly at twenty-three, he still suffered from the stigma of his
fashionable background. As Henry F. Pringle has written: "In addi
tion to his origin among New Yorkers of moderate wealth, he was a
Harvard man. He wore eyeglasses on the end of a black silk cord,
which was effeminate. In brief, he was a dude; that comic-supplement
creation born of American inferiority toward Great Britain. Even
Isaac L. Hunt, who was also a new member and who fought at Roose
velt s side in many a battle, was to recall him as *a joke ... a dude
the way he combed his hair, the way he talked the whole thing.* "
Handicapped, as Pringle observes, by his manners, his grammatical
English, and his feeling for clothes, and cursed with a comically high-
pitched voice, which he used, as a contemporary said, to address the
chairman "in the vernacular of the first families of New York," Roose
velt began his career inauspiciously. 9 His opponents were quick to

9 Henry F. Pringle: Theodore Roosevelt ( New York, 1931 ), pp. 657.

193 The Fate of the Reformer

brand him as a college-bred sissy. Learning that four members of
the national collegiate fraternity, Alpha Delta Phi, were on the
Assembly Elections Committee, the New York World wrote: "Dear!
Dear! Brother Roosevelt [is] a trader of positions on an Assembly
Committee. Let the Alpha Delta veil the Mother symbol in crepe."
"The horny-handed voters of the State will learn with surprise and
disgust that some horny-headed legislators and lawyers are intro
ducing "college politics* into contested elections to the Legislature.
The Alpha Delta Phi fraternity no doubt affords an innocent and
agreeable recreation for undergraduates, but it is not exactly a safe
guide for maturer statesmanship/ 7 x

In a short time, however, the strong personal image of himself that
Roosevelt managed to create began to take hold in the newspapers.
His vigor and sincerity began to win a hearty response, and he got
favorable notices in spite of his education and background. An upstate
editor found it ^cheering to see an occasional young man of wealth and
education -who cares for something more than to be a butterfly of
society who is willing to bring ^ie gifts of fortune to the public
service." A Boston paper thought that even though he had "aesthetic
leanings," he had delivered a "sagacious and level-headed Republican
speech/* Another decided that although he was "weighed down . . .
with a good deal of theoiy taken aboard in the leading universities of
the Old World and the New/ he was none the less "really a very bright
young man, with some practical ideas/ The Springfield Republican
was trpubled about intellectual training that would hinder young men*s
understanding of the problems of the average citizen, but it conceded
that Roosevelt s was "a culture that does not separate him from the
cause of the people/ By the time Roosevelt became a Civil Service
Commissioner, an editor was able to say: "Reform with him will never
become either a literary recreation or a hypocritical subterfuge to
cover submission to party."

Roosevelt s familiarity with the West and his ranching experiences
were a great help in establishing his virility. He was described as a
"manly, athletic, vigorous person . . . fond of hunting big game in

1 This and subsequent press comments on Roosevelt are taken from a mass of
such quotations in two master s essays written at Columbia University in 1947 and
based upon an examination of Roosevelt s scrapbooks Anne de la Vergne: The
Public Reputation of Theodore Roosevelt, 1881-2897, pp. 9-16, 456; and
Richard D. HeSher: The Public Reputation of Theodore Roosevelt: The New
Nationalism, 1890-1901, pp. 21-4, 41-5, 53-4.

THE POLITICS OF DEMOCRACY 194

the Far West [where] he is the owner of great ranches," and as
"schooled in the art of self -protection during his early days of roughing
it in the West." Heroic tales were retold of his experiences with
Indians. His skill in hunting became a political asset: "He is capable
of showing the same spirit of true sport in following the trail of the
spoilsman, as in his pursuit of the grizzly-bear of the Rocky Mountains,
and when he opens fire on civic corruption it is a good deal like the
action of a magazine-rifle at close range." Roosevelt was the only
reformer whose life could have suggested that civil-service reform was
analogous to hunting dangerous game.

Against the urban, commercial, cynical, effeminate world, Roosevelt
represented the West and the outdoors, the vigorous, energetic, manly
style of life, and a "sincere" and idealistic outlook. T. R. himself was
aware of his achievement in dramatizing the compatibility of educa
tion and reform with energy and virility, and he took it upon himself
to bring this message to the rising generation. When he was invited to
speak to Harvard undergraduates in 1894, he chose the subject, "The
Merit System and Manliness in Politics," and urged his listeners that
they be not only "good men but also manly men, that they should not
let those who stand for evil have all the virile qualities." During the
1890*5 he was especially vociferous in exhorting American men to
commit themselves to an active, hardy, practical, and yet idealistic
engagement in political struggles. "The strenuous life," of which he
often spoke, was not simply a matter of nationalism and imperial
assertion but of domestic reform politics. The good American, he
repeated, would not merely criticize; he would act. He would throw
himself into "the rough hurly-burly of the caucus" and bear his part as a
man should, not shrinking from association with "men who are some
times rough and coarse, who sometimes have lower ideals than they
should, but who are capable, masterful, and efficient/* He should
develop "the rougher, manlier virtues, and above all the virtue of
personal courage, physical as well as moral," and must be "vigorous
in mind and body," possessing the "hardy virtues" which are admired
in the soldier, "the virile fighting qualities without which no nation
. . . can ever amount to anything." It would be "unmanliness and
cowardice to shrink from the contest because at first there is failure,
or because the work is difficult or repulsive." The educated and culti
vated class had a special obligation not to show "weak good-nature,"
not to "cease doing their share of the rough, hard work which must
be done** or sink into the kind of "dilettanteism" which resembles the

195 The Fate of the Reformer

position not of the true artist but of the "cultivated, ineffective man
with a taste for bric-a-brac." 2

In the midst of the anxieties aggravated by the severe economic
depression of the nineties, this attitude was widely welcomed. "The
ardor and strength of prime manhood/ wrote a California paper, "is
a much needed quality in American government, especially at this
time, when all things political and all things social are in the transition
stage."

Roosevelt s preaching of militant nationalism and the strenuous life
helped to round out the picture of his aggressiveness. Here -was an
intellectual-in-politics who had the Jacksonian qualities of militancy
and decision, who could never be charged with cowardice, like Jeffer
son, or academicism like John Quincy Adams, or with the eunuchoid
indecisiveness of a Curtis. He was unmistakably a "fighter." "He loves
fighting, but all his fighting is for good government. Roosevelt is ag
gressiveness itself." In 1896, when American imperialism was being
criticized by academics like Theodore Woolsey and Hermann von
Hoist, the Cleveland World found in Roosevelt a perfect antidote to
timid scholarship. T. R/s influence was like a "patriotic breeze. . . .
Across the alkali plains of non-patriotism where the Woolseys . . .
the von Hoists and other professors have been evaporating, comes
this fresh welcome breath from a man as -well equipped in scholar
ship as they." If there was anything missing from the picture of virile
patriotism and pugnacity, it was supplied by Roosevelt s active and
well-publicized services with the Rough Riders in the Spanish War,
which made him, beyond question, the national hero. "His popularity
comes from certain virile characteristics which most men like," asserted
Harpers Weekly in 1899. "They are fond of the picture of the man
on horseback whether he is riding after Spaniards or grizzlies or
steers, whether he is a soldier, hunter or ranchman." Describing an
ovation given Roosevelt in 1900, the Detroit News said: "It was for
the man who banded together a strangely contrasted crew college
men and cowboys and swept with them across the page of current
history, that men cheered themselves hoarse and women paid dainty
tribute." "It is not to be expected," said the Chicago Journal the follow
ing year, "that anemic, town-bred, stage-door-haunting, dissipated

2 Harvard Crimson, November 10, 1894; see especially "The Manly Virtues and
Practical Politics" (1894) and "The College Graduate and Public Life" (1894),
from which these quotations were taken, in American Ideals (New York, 1897),
pp. 51-77-

THE POLITICS OF DEMOCRACY 196

youths can sympathize with a real man of Theodore Roosevelt s sort.
But . . . live, vigorous Americans, with red blood coursing through
their veins know how to appreciate him."

A citified, commercial civilization, bedeviled by serious depression
and troubled for the first time by the fear of decadence, greeted
Roosevelt as the harbinger of a new and more vigorous and masculine
generation. Roosevelt paved the way for Progressivism by helping to
restore prestige to educated patricians who were interested in reform,
by reinvesting their type with the male virtues. American men, im
pelled to feel tough and hard, could respond to this kind of idealism
and reform without fearing that they had unmanned themselves. In
Roosevelt one finds the archetype of what has become a common
American political image: the aspiring politician, suspected of having
too gentle an upbringing, too much idealism, or too many intellectual
interests, can pass muster if he can point to a record of active military
service; if that is lacking, having made the football team may do.

But Roosevelt had accomplished more than the negative service of
dispelling the image of the gentleman scholar as effeminate and in
effectual in politics. He had begun to show that this type of man had
a useful part to play. In the generation he and his contemporaries were
replacing, men of intellect had laid claim to leadership too much on
the ground that their social standing and their mental and moral quali
ties entitled them to it. T. R. and his generation were more disposed
to rest their claim on the ground that they performed a distinct and
necessary function in the national scheme of things. For them, the
role of the scholar in politics was founded upon his possession of
certain serviceable skills that were becoming increasingly important
to the positive functions of government. The era of the frustrated
gentleman-reformer in politics was coming to a close. With the emer
gence of the Progressive generation, the era of the scholar as expert
was about to begin.

[ 197 ]
CHAPTER VIII

The Rise of the Expert

THE Progressive era the estrangement between intellectuals
and power which had been so frustrating to the reformers of the
Gilded Age came rather abruptly to an end. America entered a new
phase of economic and social development; the old concern with
developing industry, occupying the continent, and making money was
at last matched by a new concern with humanizing and controlling the
large aggregates of power built up in the preceding decades. The
country seems to have been affected by a sort of spiritual hunger, a
yearning to apply to social problems the principles of Christian mo
rality which had always characterized its creed but too rarely its be
havior. It felt a greater need for self-criticism and self-analysis. The
principles of good government that the gentlemen reformers had
called for in vain seemed to be closer to realization.

But these principles, too, had begun to change: the civil-service
reformers had had a constricted idea of what good government would
actually do, and one reason for their small following had been their
inability to say very appealingly what good government was good for.
Now, in increasing numbers, intelligent Americans began to think
they knew. To control and humanize and moralize the great powers
that had accumulated in the hands of industrialists and political
bosses, it would be necessary to purify politics and build up the
administrative state to the point at which it could subject the Ameri
can economy to a measure of control. Of necessity, the functions of
government would become more complex; and as they did so, experts
would be in greater demand. In the interests of democracy itself,
the old Jacksonian suspicion of experts must be abated. The tension

THE POLITICS OF DEMOCRACY 198

between democracy and the educated man now seemed to be dis
appearing because the type of man wlio had always valued expertise
was now learning to value democracy and because democracy was
learning to value experts.

The new social order also required exploration and explanation:
there was an all but universal awareness that America was standing at
the threshold o a new era. The imperative business of national self-
criticism stirred ideas into life. Partly as expert, partly as social critic,
the intellectual now came back to a central position such as he had
not held in American politics for a century. But the recognition of
intellect in national affairs was not accorded on the terms anticipated
by the gentlemen reformers of the previous decades. In their eyes, the
claims of mind had been founded largely on social class and gentility:
they had lamented the disuse of intellect partly because they felt it
was entitled to greater deference; but their notion of how it ought to
be used was altogether conservative. Now, however, the claims of
intellect were not based on the social position of the men who exem
plified it, but on their usefulness in mobilizing and directing the rest
less, critical, reforming energies of the country. Intellect was rein
stalled not because of its supposed conservative influence but because
of its service to change. In this respect, the changes of the Progressive
era in social criticism and administrative organization did not look
back to the conservative civil service envisaged in the days of Hayes
and Garfield but forward to the New Deal welfare state and Frank
lin D. Roosevelt s brain trust.

Doubtless, the Progressives were more effective in creating a new
moral atmosphere than in realizing a new administrative regime. It
was the moral and intellectual requirements of the period which put
its intellectuals in unprecedented rapport not only with the American
public but with the country s political leaders. Some men of intellect
were drawn toward politics from the outside: but others emerged
directly within the political order, and found there a more secure and
honored place than their predecessors. Political life offered prominent
roles to men who were interested in ideas and scholarship men like
Theodore Roosevelt, Woodrow Wilson, Henry Cabot Lodge, Albert J.
Beveridge, Robert M. La Follette. Among the outstanding political
leaders of the Progressive movement, Bryan alone kept alive the anti-
intellectualist strain in popular democracy. 1 La Follette enjoys a special

1 For a revealing contemporary encounter, see the interview with Bryan re
ported by John Reed in Cottier s, Vol. LVII ( May 2,0, 1916 ) , pp. 11 ff.

199 The Rise of the Expert

place; though less a scholar or an intellectual than some of his con
temporaries, he must be credited with the origins of the brain-trust
idea, both because of the effective union he achieved, as governor
of Wisconsin, between the University of Wisconsin and die state
government, and because of the efficient, research-minded staff he
brought with him to Washington during his senatorial days. From the
very beginning of his political career, La Follette gave the lie to
George Washington Plunkitt s assertion that a college background was
of no use in practical politics, when he rallied his former classmates
for his first campaigns and made them the nucleus of a well-knit
political machine. If Roosevelt had shown that intellect was com
patible with virility, La Follette showed that intellect could be politi
cally effective.

Progressivism moved from local and state levels to national politics.
It was in the state governments that the new agencies of regulation
first went into operation and that a substantial place for experts in
legislation was first created. The trial ground for the role of experts
in political life was not Washington but the state capitals, particularly
Madison, Wisconsin, which offered the first example of experts in the
service of "the people" and the state. In its successes and failures,
in the very antagonisms it aroused, the La Follette experiment in
Wisconsin was a bellwether for national Progressive politics and a
historical prototype for the New Deal brain trust. The Wisconsin
experience is particularly instructive because it prefigured an entire
cycle in the role of experts and intellectuals in politics which has by
now become familiar: first, there was an era of change and discontent
which brought a demand for such men; next, the intellectuals and
experts became identified with the reforms they formulated and
helped to administer; then, an increasing distaste for reforms arose,
often in direct response to their effectiveness. This distaste was felt
above all by business interests, which arraigned governmental med
dling, complained of the costs of reform, and attempted to arouse the
public against reformers with a variety of appeals, among them anti-
intellectualism. Finally, the reformers were ousted, but not all their
reforms were undone.

The first impetus toward what came to be known as "the Wisconsin
idea" occurred in 1892, when the new School of Economics, Political

THE POLITICS OF DEMOCRACY aoo

Science, and History was set up at the University of Wisconsin, under
the direction o the young economist, Richard T. Ely. Frederick
Jackson Turner and President Thomas C. Chamberlain, the leaders o
this movement, hoped to make Wisconsin a pioneer among Mid
western states in promoting social science, which they felt had im
mense potentialities for providing practical guidance to the complex
industrial world that had come into being within the past quarter
century. As they planned it, the university would become a center of
training in administration and citizenship, and would evolve into an
efficient practical servant of the state.

The role of the university, it must be emphasized, was to be wholly
nonpartisan; it would be impartial between the political parties, and, in
a larger sense, it -was expected to serve "the people" as a whole, not a
particular class interest. It would not offer propaganda or ideologies,
but information, statistics, advice, skill, and training. By the same
token, it was hoped that the prestige of the university would grow with
its usefulness. University leaders did not anticipate any profound
challenge to vested interests. In an early letter Turner asked that Ely
"briefly indicate to me the practical ways in which such a school, in
your opinion, can be made serviceable to the people of Wisconsin. . . .
The very novelty of these practical aspects of the School is what will
win us support from these hard headed Wisconsin capitalists if any
thing will/* 2 Turner later expressed this notion of impartial science
more clearly:

By training in science, in law, politics, economics, and history
the universities may supply from the ranks of democracy adminis
trators, legislators, judges and experts for commissioners who shall
disinterestedly and intelligently mediate between contending in
terests. When the word "capitalistic classes * and "the proletariate"
can be used and understood in America, it is surely time to de
velop such men, with the ideal of service to the State, who may
help to break the force of these collisions., to find common grounds
between the contestants and to possess the respect and confi
dence of all parties which are genuinely loyal to the best American
ideals. The signs of such a development are already plain in the
expert commissions of some States; in the increasing proportion of
university men in legislatures; in the university men s influence in

2 Merle Curti and Vernon Carstensen: The University of Wisconsin (Madison,
1949 )> Vol. I, p. 632. This work has a full-bodied account of the role of the
university in the "Wisconsin idea/

The Rise of the Expert

federal departments and commissions. It is hardly too much to say
that the best hope of intelligent and principled progress in eco
nomic and social legislation and administration lies in the increas
ing influence of American universities.

Turner went on to say that he could see the danger to the universities
in all this. "Pioneer democracy" had always had scant respect for the
expert, and the expert would have to go on contending against the
"inherited suspicion" of his land; but he could overcome it with "crea
tive imagination and personality." 3

By the end of the century, the university had gathered some distin
guished scholars, who were concentrating on social and economic
problems, notably on those of the state and the municipality; it had
produced a number of excellent monographs. With its extension system
it was helping to educate the people of the state. Through its farmers
institutes it had drawn close to the agricultural interests and had done
much to raise the technical level of agriculture in Wisconsin. Its
program became truly controversial, however, after the election of
Robert M. La Follette as governor in 1900. A graduate of the univer
sity, fully in sympathy with the aspirations of its idealistic leaders, La
Follette was quick to make use of its experts, who were called upon
for advice in his program of tax reform, railroad control, and direct
primary legislation.

The efforts of the university were soon supplemented by those of
another independent agency, the Legislative Reference Service, or
ganized under another recent Wisconsin graduate student, the ener
getic Charles McCarthy. McCarthy s aspirations for the reference li
brary were like those of Turner for the university: it was to be an
impartial service organization. In the age of the railroad, the telephone,
the telegraph, and the insurance company, the problems of the state,
he remarked, were growing so various and complex that vast amounts
of information were necessary for legislators to deal with them intel
ligently. "The only sensible thing to do is to have experts gather this
material/ It was not a question of commitment to one side or another
of a legislative debate: 4

As to our department in Wisconsin, we are not trying to influ
ence our legislators in any way, we are not upon one side or an-

3 F. J. Turner: "Pioneer Ideals and the State University/" a commencement
address delivered at the University of Indiana in 1910 and reprinted in The
Frontier in American History (New York, 1920), pp. 285-6; italics are mine.

* Charles McCarthy: The Wisconsin Idea (New York, 1912), pp.

THE POLITICS OF DEMOCRACY 202,

other of any question nor are we for or against anybody or any
thing; we are merely a business branch of the government. We are
not dictating legislation but are merely servants of the able and
honest legislators of our state, clerks to gather and index and put
together the information that these busy men desire; it is a busi
ness proposition.

This ideal may now seem as naive as it was sincere. La Follette s
governorship was on "one side or another" of quite a few questions;
it challenged the interests of the Taard headed Wisconsin capitalists *
whose support Turner had hoped to win. Moreover, after 1903, when
the president of the university was La Follette s friend, Charles P. Van
Hise, who believed in making the university an integral arm of the
state, the irritation of conservatives mounted. Matters were not eased
by the publicity the "Wisconsin idea" got from journalists throughout
the country (most of them sympathetic) who came to examine Wis
consin as a model Progressive state in action and went away to write
in exaggerated terms about "the university that governs a state." 5

The publicity inspired by the journalists may have caused progres
sives in other states to consider a closer imitation of the Wisconsin
model, but within the state it contributed to the conviction of the
conservatives that the university was part of a conspiracy against them.
Actually, the university experts did not think of themselves as radicals,
and did not even consider that they had brought a great deal of initia
tive into government. An examination of university personnel most
active in state service shows that it was mainly technicians ( engineers,
geologists, scientists, and various kinds of agricultural experts ) rather
than policy advisers who served the state, and that the university of
fered far more technical information than ideology. John R. Commons,
one of the most outstanding of the Wisconsin social scientists, con
sidered the university faculty itself overwhelmingly conservative, and
recalled: "I was never called in except by Progressives, and only when
they wanted me. I never initiated anything/ e

Nevertheless, university men were consulted on taxation and rail
road regulation, and on other matters, and their influence was resented.

5 On political tension in the Van Hise era, see Curti and Carstensen: op. cit.,
Vol. II, especially pp. 4, 10-11, 19-21, 26, 40-1, 87-90, 97, 100-7, 55O-2, 587-92.

6 John R. Commons: Myself (New York, 1934), p. no. Cf. McCarthy: "As a
general rule the professors wait until asked before venturing to give an opinion
upon a public question." Op. cit., p. 137; for a list of university personnel in the
service of the state, see pp. 313-17.

203 The Rise of the Expert

La Follette was proud that for the old-fashioned secret back-room
conferences of bosses which prevailed in the days when Wisconsin
was run in the interests of private corporations, he had substituted a
Saturday lunch club at which he sat down with McCarthy and Presi
dent Van Hise, with Commons, Edward A. Ross, Ely, and other univer
sity professors to discuss the problems of the state. 7 Business interests
which suffered from the Progressive policies and indeed many which
suffered from nothing more than fear of further extension of regulation
became convinced that the university and the Legislative Reference
Service must be counted among their enemies, along with the Railroad
Commission, the Tax Commission, and the Industrial Commission.

In 1914, when the Wisconsin Progressive Republicans were hurt by
the nation-wide split in the party, the conservatives saw their op
portunity. They defeated La Follette s Progressive successor, and re
turned to power with Emanuel L. Philipp, a railroad and lumber man.
In his campaign Philipp featured anti-intellectualist denunciations of
university experts, and called for a reduction in taxes, retrenchment in
the university, and an end to its political "meddling/ There must be, he
said, a thorough house-cleaning at the university; socialism was gaining
ground there, and "many graduates are leaving with ideas that are un-
American." The employment of experts, he said, would lead to the
continuing encroachment of the university upon politics. To turn gov
ernment over to experts was, in any case, a confession that the duly
elected officials were incompetent. If the state reached the point of
conceding that all political wisdom was locked up in the university, the
rest of the people might as well confess "mental bankruptcy." Philipp s
attack included a demand for the abolition of McCarthy s "bill factory,"
the Legislative Reference Library.

Once elected, Philipp proved more benign toward these institutions
than his campaign had promised. Although he did ask the legislature
for the abolition of McCarthy s library and for university retrenchment
and consolidation, he became increasingly circumspect as time passed.
The growth of the university was checked and its influence trimmed,
but Philipp, confronted with a formidable and highly respectable op
position among the friends of the university throughout the country,
made peace with Van Hise. Even McCarthy escaped: the governor dis
covered that his claim to impartiality had some foundation, when

7 Autobiography (Madison, Wisconsin, 1913), p. 32; on his use of university
personnel, see pp. 26, 30-1, 310-11, 348-50.

THE POLITICS OF DEMOCRACY

draftsmen of conservative bills began to use the Legislative Reference
Service. 8

The commitment of the university to Progressivism had never been
completely accepted within the institution itself. As Commons re
marked, many of its staff were thoroughly conservative. But more than
this, many felt that the practical involvement of the university, re
gardless of its precise political shading, was itself a betrayal of the old-
fashioned ideals of pure, disinterested intellectualism. J. F. A. Pyre,
writing about the university in 1920, took issue with Van Hise s view
that the university should be conceived as "an asset of the state/ This,
he said, was an excessively materialistic view of its function and down
graded the tradition of disinterested and autonomous learning, to the
ultimate cost of the university. 9 But most of the experts at the university
would doubtless have accepted the pragmatism expressed by Mc
Carthy in his book, The Wisconsin Idea. The older thinkers, in fields
like economics, he contended, had been "men of doctrinaire theories
who had never studied the actual problems of government at first
hand." They were being replaced by common-sense experts who
looked at economic questions at first hand and could test their theories
"by the hard facts of actual events." 1 Hence, while the lay community
debated whether it should accept or reject experts, the scholarly
community debated whether the serviceable expert or the man of pure
learning held the true key to the future of the university.

Progressive achievement in the arena of power may have been
limited, but the Progressive atmosphere seemed indefinitely expan
sive; this was immensely heartening to those who were concerned
with the place of mind in American society. The horizons of intellect
grew wider, it -was free and exuberant, and it seemed now to have been

8 See Robert S. Maxwell: Emanuel L. Philipp: Wisconsin Stalwart (Madison,
Wisconsin, 1959), chapters 7 and 8, especially pp. 74, 769, 82, 91, 92, 96104.
The Nation saw a disheartening lesson on American anti-intellectualism in the
attack on the university. "Between Demos and the professor/* it lamented, "there is
a gulf of misunderstanding and ignorance unbridged since the days of Aristoph
anes." "Demos and the Professor/ Vol. C ( May 2,7, 1915 ), p. 596.

9 J. F. A. Pyre: Wisconsin (New York, 1920), pp. 347-51, 364-5.

1 The Wisconsin Idea, pp. 1889; cf. p. 138. McCarthy s point of view can best
be understood against the background of the development of pragmatism and the
rebellion against the older generation of scholars described in, Morton G. White s
Social Thought in America: The Revolt against Formalism (New York, 1949).

20$ The Rise of the "Expert

put in touch with the higher reaches of power, as well as with the
national mood. What Mabel Dodge Luhan said, thinking mainly of arts
and letters, was true of every area of American life: "Barriers went
down and people reached each other who had never been in touch be
fore; there were all sorts of new ways to communicate, as well as new
communications." 2 In this age of the "Little Renaissance" the keynote
for arts and letters was liberation; for scholarship it was the enlarged
possibilities for influence. Everywhere there was the intoxicant of new
interests and new freedom. There was nothing that could not be re-
examined, from railway franchises and the misdeeds of the trusts to
sexual life and the conduct of education. Muckrakers were in demand
to tell the public just how wicked things were, publicists to interpret
the meaning of events, ministers and editors to point the moral, scholars
to work out a theoretical rationale for Progressivism in philosophy, law,
history, and political science, and technicians of all kinds to emerge
from the academies and make detailed factual studies of social and
economic problems, even to staff the new regulatory commissions.

This ferment of ideas, however, brought no social revolution; the
old masters of America emerged, at the end of the period, almost as
fully in control as they had been before it began. But in matters of tone
and style there was a powerful uplift, and tone and style are of first
importance not only to scholars and men of letters, but to politicians as
well. No one benefited more than the intellectuals, whether they were
publicists like Walter Lippmann and Herbert Croly or academic
scholars like John Dewey and Charles A. Beard. All their work was
animated by the heartening sense that the gulf between the world of
theory and the world of practice had been finally bridged. Lippmann
captured the essence of this feeling in his book, "Drift and Mastery,
published in 1914, in which he found that the new capacity for con
trol, for mastery, was the key to the promise of his generation. The most
abstracted of scholars could derive a sense of importance from belong
ing to a learned community which the larger world -was compelled to
consult in its quest for adequate means of social control. It was no
longer possible to dismiss ideas by calling them "academic," for no one
any longer saw a clear boundary between the academy and society.
"A newer type of college professor is ... everywhere in evidence/*
wrote an observer, 3

2 Movers and Shakers ( New York, 1936 ) , p. 39.

3 B.P.: "College Professors and the Public," Atlantic Monthly, Vol. LXXXIX
( February, 190^), pp. 2845.

THE POLITICS OF DEMOCRACY 206

the expert who knows all about railroads and bridges and sub
ways; about gas commissions and electrical supplies; about cur
rency and banking, Philippine tariffs, Venezuelan boundary
lines., the industries of Porto Rico, the classification of the civil
service, the control of trusts.

Perhaps most important of all, the skills of such academic experts
were not only needed but applauded. A few commentators might
worry about the relationship between the expert and democracy, 4 and
an occasional businessman, frightened by the costs of regulation, might
fulminate against the rising influence of theorists, 5 but on the whole the
new experts had a good press and were widely accepted by the public.
Brander Matthews thought in 1909 that it was "an evidence of the com
mon sense of the American people that the prejudice against the Col
lege Professors, like that against the men of letters, is rapidly dying
down, and that there is beginning to be public recognition and public
appreciation of the service they are rendering to the Commonwealth.
... It is partly due to a growing understanding of the real value of
the expert and the theorist." 6

There was a significant acceptance, moreover, among political lead
ers themselves. It was characteristic of the age that a journalist like
Isaac Marcosson should bring Theodore Roosevelt the proofs of a book
by a muckraking novelist like Upton Sinclair, and that his doing so
would speed the passage of a pure food bill. Quite aside from the pres
ence in the Senate of men like Beveridge and Lodge who prided them
selves on their "scholarship," this was the first time since the nation s
beginnings that presidents of the United States could be described as
intellectuals.

4 See Joseph Lee: "Democracy and the Expert," Atlantic Monthly, Vol. CII
(November, 1908), pp. 61120.

5 For example, the Chicago packer, Thomas E. Wilson, who pleaded before a
Congressional committee in 1906: "What we are opposed to, and what we appeal to
you for protection against is a bill that will put our business in the hands of
theorists, chemists, sociologists, etc., and the management and control taken away
from the men who have devoted their lives to the upbuilding and perfecting of this
great American industry/* Lest it be imagined that Wilson was fighting against a
proposal to nationalize the packing industry, it should be explained that he was ap
pearing against a pure food and drug measure. House Committee on Agriculture,
59th Congress, ist session, Hearings on the So-Called "Beveridge Amendment,"
(Washington, 1906), p. 5. On the actual role of experts in the fight for food and
drug control, see Oscar E. Anderson, Jr/s biography of Harvey W. Wiley: The
Health of a Nation ( Chicago, 1958 ) .

6 "Literary Men and Public Affairs," North American Review, Vol. CLXXXIX
(April, 1909), p. 536.

207 The Rise of the Expert

A closer look at both T.R. and Wilson will show that each in his own
way provided a kind of living commentary on the limits of the rela
tionship between intellect and power. Their presidencies encouraged
the belief that ideas had a vital part in government; but at the same
time, neither was entirely in sympathy with his intellectual contempo
raries, and neither enjoyed their full confidence. T.R., it must be said,
took a lively and wide-ranging interest in ideas, enjoyed the company
of men like Croly, Lippmann, and Steffens, found a government job
for Edwin Arlington Robinson, attracted into public service a vigorous
and dedicated type of man not much seen in government for -well over
a generation one thinks of Robert Bacon, Charles Bonaparte, Felix
Frankfurter, James Garfield, Franklin K. Lane, and Gifford Pinchot
and called upon academic experts for advice on railroad control, im
migration, meat inspection, and other issues. In this he did more to
restore mind and talents to public affairs than any president since
Lincoln, probably more indeed than any since Jefferson. Lord Bryce,
commenting on Roosevelt s achievement, thought that he had "never
in any country seen a more eager, high-minded and efficient set of
public servants, men more useful and creditable to their country, than
the men doing the work of the American Government in Washington
and in the field." 7 It sounds exactly like the kind of regime the gentle
man reformers of the Gilded Age had called for.

Yet Roosevelt was rather quick to turn on his intellectual friends for
what might have been considered marginal differences of opinion, and
to dress himself as a stuffed-shirt Americanist when confronted with
heterodox ideas. He misgauged the significance of many a mild protest
he imagined, for example, that the muckrakers were a dangerous lot
who were building up "revolutionary feeling." Although no twentieth-
century president has a greater claim to be considered an intellectual,
his feeling about the place of intellect in life was as ambivalent as that
of the educated strata of the middle class which looked up to him. He
admired intellectual ability, just as he admired business ability, and, if
anything, his admiration for intellect was firmer. 8 But what he called

7 Quoted by Paul P. Van Riper: History of United States Civil Service, p. 206;
cf. pp. 189-207, and John Blum: "The Presidential Leadership of Theodore
Roosevelt," Michigan Mumntis Quarterly Review, Vol. LXV (December, 1958),
pp. 1-9.

8 Cf. a famous letter of 1908: "I am simply unable to make myself take the atti
tude of respect toward the very wealthy men which such an enormous multitude
of people evidently really feel. I am delighted to show any courtesy to Pierpont
Morgan or Andrew Carnegie or James J. Hill; but as for regarding any one of them
as, for instance, I regard Professor Bury, or Peary, the Arctic explorer, or Admiral

THE POLITICS OF DBMOCRACY 208

"character" he unceasingly placed above both. Indeed, he embodied
the American preference for character over intellect in politics and life,
and the all but universal tendency to assume that the two somehow
stand in opposition to each other. His writings continually return to
this contrast: "Character is far more important than intellect to the
race as to the individual." "Exactly as strength comes before beauty, so
character must stand above intellect, above genius." "Oh, how I wish I
could warn all my countrymen . - , against that most degrading of
processes, the deification of mere intellectual acuteness, wholly unac
companied by moral responsibility. . . ? 9 What seems questionable
about these repeated adjurations against intellect-without-character is
not that they \vere wrong but that they were pointless unless he actually
believed that there was a tendency in American life to exalt intellect at
the expense of morals a curious judgment in the high moral climate of
the Progressive era.

Wilson has been said to have brought to the presidency the temper
of the scholar, with its faults and virtues; and few students of the man
believe that he had the personal qualities best suited to effective politi
cal leadership in the United States. The peculiar rigidity of his mind
and his lack of bonhomie, however, seem to be more the result of his
Presbyterianism than his scholarly vocation, and probably still more
constituted distinctively personal qualities. As a scholar and a critical
intellect, he was a creature of the past. His creative intellectual Me
had almost come to an end by the close of the iSSo s, the decade in
which he wrote his brilliant book on Congressional Government and his
more compendious effort, The State. In his tastes, his ideas, and his
reading he -was a somewhat parochial Southern version of a Victorian
gentleman., his mind pleasantly fixed in the era just before the United
States became a complex modern society. He believed in small busi
ness, competitive economics, colonialism, Anglo-Saxon and white su
premacy, and a suffrage restricted to men, long after such beliefs had
become objects of mordant critical analysis. His first ideas had come
from Bagehot and Burke, and he had just missed exposure to the re
markable fin de siecle sunburst of critical thought whose impact car-
Evans, or Rhodes the historian, or Selous, the big game hunter . . . why, I could
not force myself to do it even if I wanted to, which I do not." Elting Morison, ed. :
The Letters of Theodore Roosevelt, Vol. VI (Cambridge, 1952), p. 100^.

9 Works, Memorial Ed., Vol. XIV, p. 128; Outlook (November 8, 1913), p. 527;
Works, Vol. XVI, p. 484; cf. other statements to the same effect: Outlook (April 23,
1910), p. 880; Address, October 11, 1897, at the Two Hundredth Anniversary of
the Old Dutch Reformed Church of Sleepy Hollow (New York, 1898); Works,
Vol. XVII, p. 3; XII, p. 623.

The Rise of the Expert

ried over into the Progressive era. During the iSgo s he was busy as a
kind of academic man of affairs, bridging the gap between the aca
demic community and the lay world; and while many of his scholarly
contemporaries were ripping up the complacent assumptions of the
Gilded Age, Wilson was speaking to groups of laymen, dishing out the
kind of fare that bankers and industrialists like to have served by
university presidents. From the moment he took the presidency of
Princeton in 1902, he ceased trying to stay in touch with developments
in the world of ideas. In 1916 he candidly confessed: "I haven t read a
serious book through for fourteen years." * Understandably, then., his
style of thought during his active public career -was not much affected
by the most creative side of American intellectual life, and his mind
was hardly the object of unstinted admiration by contemporary intel
lectuals.

It is true that when Wilson was elected in 1912 he was supported by
many intellectuals who were by then disillusioned by T.R. and who
responded to the unmistakable note of nobility in Wilson. But Wilson
was not disposed, before the war, to make the extensive use of intel
lectual advisers in politics that his academic background seemed to
promise. Moreover, he had a persistent distrust of what he called
"experts." Unlike T.R. and La Follette, he did not conceive of experts
as likely agents or administrators of reform, but rather as hirelings
available only to big business and special interests. Whereas most
Progressive thinkers contrasted government by big business with a
popular government that would employ experts to regulate unac
ceptable business practices, Wilson thought of big business, vested in
terests, and experts as a solid combine that could be beaten only by
returning government to "the people." As against T.R., he contended
that any experts engaged to regulate big business would be controlled
by big business. "What I fear," he said during his 1912 campaign, 2

is a government of experts. God forbid that in a democratic coun
try we should resign the task and give the government over to ex
perts. What are we for if we are to be scientifically taken care of

1 Arthur Link: Wilson: The New Freedom (Princeton, 1956), p. 63; cf. Link s
discussion of Wilson s mind, pp. 6270.

2 A Crossroads of Freedom: The 191.2, Campaign Speeches of Woodrow Wilson,
ed. by John W. Davidson (New Haven, 1956) pp. 83-4. Wilson s ideas about
experts seem to have been influenced to some extent by the part played by experts
in the tariff controversy and also by the fight over pure food practices in T.R/s
administration. Ibid , pp. 113, 1601; see also the comments on experts in The
New Democracy: Presidential Messages, Addresses, and Other Papers, ed. by
R. ,S. Baker and W. E. Dodd, Vol. I (New York, 1926), pp. 10, 16.

THE POLITICS OF DEMOCRACY

by a small number of gentlemen who are the only men wlio tinder-
stand the job? Because if we don t understand the job, then we
are not a free people. We ought to resign our free institutions and
go to school to somebody and find out what it is we are about. I
want to say I have never heard more penetrating debate of public
questions than I have sometimes been privileged to hear in clubs
of workingmen; because the man who is down against the daily
problem of life doesn t talk about it in rhetoric; he talks about it in
facts. And the only thing I am interested in is facts.

The picture of Wilson frequenting workingmen s clubs and disdain -
ing rhetoric is refreshingly novel. But on the whole Wilson lived up to
the promise of these remarks when he formulated his domestic policies.
Inevitably, the role of experts in government grew considerably dur
ing his administration, 3 as it had for more than a decade. And the
president did, of course, solicit a great deal of advice on economic
policy from Louis D. Brandeis, whose ideas about business competi
tion coincided with his own predilections. But Wilson bowed to the
animus of Back Bay and the business community in keeping Brandeis
out of his Cabinet, and in the main he sought advice from different
types from men like his worshipful secretary, Joe Tumulty, who had a
good grasp of machine politics and press relations; or his son-in-law,
William Gibbs McAdoo, an amply progressive but not highly reflective
mind; and above all, from the subtle and intelligent Colonel House, not

3 This was notably true of the Department of Agriculture under the Secretary
ship of David F. Houston, the former chancellor of Washington University and
president of the University of Texas whom Wilson had appointed upon House s
suggestion. During Houston s tenure, the problems of marketing and distribution
received much greater attention than before and the Department of Agriculture
became a magnet for able agricultural economists.

There is suggestive information on the growth of expertise in government during
the Progressive era in Leonard D. White: "Public Administration/* Recent Social
Trends in the United States ( New York, 1934), Vol. II, pp. 1414 E.

It should be added that Wilson adhered to the venerable tradition of making
diplomatic appointments from the ranks of scholars and men of letters. He offered
two appointments, both declined, to President Charles William Eliot of Harvard;
sent Professor Paul Reinsch, an expert on international affairs, to China, Walter
Hines Page (an unfortunate choice) to Great Britain, Thomas Nelson Page (a
politically opportune appointment) to Italy, the ineffable Henry Van Dyke of
Princeton to the Netherlands, and Brand Whitlock to Belgium. The level of
Wilson s ambassadorial appointments was generally considered satisfactory, but
they were offset by Bryan s raid upon the competent professional diplomatic corps
which had been built up by John Hay, Roosevelt, and Taft. Bryan s raid on
ministerial appointments in the interest of "deserving Democrats," to which
Wilson consented, has been described by Arthur Link as "the greatest debauchery
of the Foreign Service in the twentieth century/ WiUon: The New Freedom,
p. 106.

The Rise of the Expert

the least of whose talents was the capacity to feed Wilson s vanity.
House, who served among other things as a channel for the views of
the wealthy and powerful, was a strong counterpoise to Progressive
figures in the Wilson circle such as Brandeis, Bryan, and McAdoo.

Wilson s administration was not overwhelmingly popular among
intellectuals in its first few years especially among those who thought
that the Progressive movement should go beyond the effort to realize
the old competitive ideals of small businessmen and do something
about child labor, the position of Negroes, the condition of working-
men, and the demand for women s suffrage. 4 Intellectuals interested in
reform were too skeptical about Wilson to welcome unreservedly even
the music of his sonorous speeches, which seemed to them to have
overtones of a moralistic but unprogressive past, and their skepticism
seemed justified by the halting manner in which reforms were pursued.
Herbert Croly, who observed that Wilson s mind "is fully convinced
of the everlasting righteousness of its own performances and surrounds
this conviction with a halo of shimmering rhetoric," complained also
that the President s thinking made "even the most concrete things
seem like abstractions. . . . His mind is like a light which destroys the
outlines of what it plays upon; there is much illumination, but you see
very little." 5

Only by 1916, in response to the recent achievements of the New
Freedom and Wilson s success in keeping out of war, did liberal intel
lectuals swing wholeheartedly to his support. The war itself, ironically,
raised many of them to heights of influence as no domestic issue could.
Historians and writers were mobilized for propaganda, and experts of
all kinds were recruited as advisers. Military Intelligence, Chemical
Warfare, the War Industries Board swarmed with academics, and
Washington s Cosmos Club was reported to be "little better than a fac
ulty meeting of all the universities." 6 In September 1919 Colonel House

4 Link: Wilson: The New Freedom, chapter 8. A classic statement of tliis view-
was made by Walter Lippmann in Drift and Mastery, especially chapter 7.

5 "Presidential Complacency," New Republic, Vol. I (November 21, 1914),
p. 7; "The Other-Worldliness of Wilson," Netv Republic, Vol. II (March 27, 1915)*
p. 195. Charles Forcey s The Crossroads of Liberalism, Croly, Weyl, Lippmann
and the Progressive Era, 1900-19.25 (New York, 1961) is instructive about the
relations of the New Republic group with Roosevelt and Wilson. On the impasse
the New Freedom seemed to have reached by 1914 and the discouragement of
liberal intellectuals, see Arthur Link: Woodrow Wilson, and his The Progressive
Era, 1910-2917 (New York, 1954)> especially pp. 66-80.

6 Gordon Hall Gerould: "The Professor and the Wide, Wide World/
Scribners, Vol. LXV (April, 1919), p. 466. Gerould thought it would no longer be
possible to condescend to the professors after this experience. "The jprofessor,"
wrote another, ". . . was reputed to be learned, and much, to everyone s surprise

THE POLITICS OF DEMOCRACY

organized for Wilson the group of scholars known as The Inquiry
(which already had its counterparts in Great Britain and France). At
one time the expert personnel of The Inquiry numbered 150 persons
historians, geographers, statisticians, ethnologists, economists, politi
cal scientists and these, with their assistants and staffs, brought the
number of the whole organization to several hundred. Kept secret until
the Armistice, The Inquiry was then revamped as the Intelligence
Division of the American Commission to Negotiate Peace, and its staff
accompanied Wilson to Paris, where it played a part of no small im
portance. There was a certain amount of amused comment about this
group in the press, and a certain skepticism among old-school diplomats
about this tribe of political amateurs, with their three army trucldoads
of documents. 7 On the whole, however, considering the passions
aroused by the war, the peace negotiations, and the debate over the
treaty and the League Covenant, what is most remarkable is the general
public acceptance of scholars in their advisory role. A politician like
Senator Lawrence Sherman of Illinois who launched a long and fero
cious diatribe against the expansion of governmental powers during the
war, and particularly against "a government by professors and intellec
tuals," stood out as an exception for his rancorous anti-intellectualism. 8

he has turned out to be intelligent." "The Demobilized Professor," Atlantic
Monthly, Vol. CXXIII (April, 1919), p. 539. Paul Van Dyke thought that the
college man had succeeded, during the war, in showing that he -was virile and

radical, not soft or incompetent. "The College Man in Action/ Scribner s, Vol.
XV (May, 1919), pp. 5603. It is instructive to compare the argument of this
piece with the earlier utterances of Theodore Roosevelt.

7 On The Inquiry and its personnel, see the article by its head, Sidney E.
Mezes, in E. M. House and Charles Seymour., eds.: What Really Happened at
Paris (New York, 1921); Papers Relating to the Foreign Relations of the United
States., 1919, Vol. I, The Paris Peace Conference (Washington, 1942); J. T. Shot-
well: At the Paris Peace Conference, pp. 1516. On wartime mobilization of
science, see A. Hunter Dupree: Science in the Federal Government, chapter 16.

8 This remarkable speech is replete with the cliches of anti-intellectualism, and
though it can hardly be imagined to have had much influence at the time, it must
be taken as a landmark in anti-intellectualist oratory: "... a coterie of politicians
gilded and plated by a group of theorizing, intolerant intellectuals as wildly im
practical as ever beat high heaven with their phrase-making jargon. . . . They
appeal to the iconoclast, the freak, the degenerate . . . essayists of incalculable
horsepower who have essayed everything under the sun ... a fair sprinkle of
socialists. . . . Everything will be discovered. . . . Psychologists with X-ray
vision drop different colored handkerchiefs on a table, spill a half pint of navy
beans, ask you in a sepulchral tone what disease Walter Raleigh died of, and de
mand the number of legumes without counting. Your memory, perceptive faculties,
concentration, and other mental giblets are tagged and you are pigeonholed for
future reference. I have seen those psychologists in my time and have dealt with
them. If they were put out in a forest or in a potato patch, they have not sense
enough to kill a rabbit or dig a potato to save themselves from the pangs of
starvation. This is a government by professors and intellectuals. I repeat, intellec-

The Rise of the Expert

But he was prophetic of the future, for the reaction against the war
liquidated the Progressive spirit.

The public mood changed with stunning abruptness. W illiam Allen
White, who in 1919 was still telling the chairman of the Republican
National Committee that the party s "incrusted old reactionaries" were
done for, was lamenting a year later that "the Pharisees are running
the temple" and that the people were not even troubling to object.
"What a God-damned world this is!" he wrote to Ray Stannard Baker in
1920. "If anyone had told me ten years ago that our country would be
what it is today ... I should have questioned his reason." 9 The con
sequences were fatal for the position of the intellectuals: having tied
themselves to Wilson and the conduct of the war, they had made it
certain that they would suffer from the public reaction against him and
everything connected with him. But, more decisively, they had broken
their own morale by the uncritical enthusiasm with which most of them
had entered into the war spirit. With the exception of some socialists
and a few thinkers like Randolph Bourne and the group behind the
Seven Arts magazine, the intellectuals were either engaged in the war
or supported it wholeheartedly, and they entertained the same fervid
expectations of triumph and reform as a result of it that many of them
had had with respect to the Progressive movement. The peace left them
disappointed, ashamed, guilty. "If I had it to do all over again," said
Walter Lippmann, "I would take the other side. . . . We supplied the
Battalion of Death with too much ammunition." And Herbert Croly
confessed that he had had no idea "what the psychology of the Ameri
can people would be under the strain of fighting a world war." a The
rapprochement between the intellectuals and the people dissolved
even more quickly than it had been made. The public turned on the
intellectuals as the prophets of false and needless reforms, as architects
of the administrative state, as supporters of the war, even as ur-
Bolsheviks; the intellectuals turned on America as a nation of boobs,
Babbitts, and fanatics. Those who were young and free enough ex
patriated themselves; the others stayed home and read Mencken. It
-would take a depression and another era of reform to overcome this
estrangement.

tuals are good enough in their places, but a country run by professors is ultimately
destined to Bolshevism and an explosion." Congressional Record? 65th Congress,
and session, pp. 9875, 9877 ( September 3, 1918).

9 Walter Johnson, ed.: Selected Letters of William AUen White (New York,
1947), PP- i99-*oo> 208, sis.

1 Forcey: op. cit., pp. 5192, 301.

THE POLITICS OF DEMOCRACY

During the New Deal the rapprochement between intellectuals and
the public was restored. Never had there been such complete harmony
between the popular cause in politics and the dominant mood of the
intellectuals. In the Progressive era, the intellectuals and the public
had, by and large, espoused the same causes. In the New Deal era, the
causes were still more engaging, and the need for intellectuals to play a
practical role was greater than anyone could have anticipated in the
days of Wilson and T.R. But the minority that opposed the New Deal
did so with a feverish hostility rarely seen in American politics. While
the intellectuals were riding high, a rancorous feeling was forming
against them that burst out spectacularly after World War II.

In the long run, the intellectuals were to suffer from this intransigent
minority almost as much as they profited in the short run from the pa
tronage of the New Deal. But, in its first flush, what patronage it was!
Like everyone else, intellectuals had suffered from the depression,
sharing in its unemployment and in its shock to morale. The New
Deal gave thousands of jobs to young lawyers and economists, -who
flocked to Washington to staff its newly created agencies of regulation;
the research, artistic, and theater projects of the WPA and NYA helped
unemployed artists, intellectuals, and college students. Even more im
portant than this practical aid was a pervasive intangible: by making
use of theorists and professors as advisers and ideologists, the New
Deal brought the force of mind into closer relation with power than
it had been -within the memory of any living man closer than it had
been since the days of the Founding Fathers. To offer important work
to young men emerging from colleges and law schools was in itself an
arresting novelty. But to give to academic advisers such importance as
the New Deal gave was to aggrandize the role of every professor and
of every speculative or dissenting mind. Ideas, theories, criticisms took
on a new value, and the place to go for them was to men who were
intellectually trained. 2 The economic collapse had demonstrated that
such men were needed, but it was the New Deal that showed how
they could make themselves felt. Not surprisingly, the New Deal
aroused the enthusiasm of all but a small number of conservative in
tellectuals on one side and a small number of radicals at the other.

2 As Paul P. Van Riper points out, this led to a certain privilege in influencing
new policies, which he describes as "ideological patronage." Op. cit., pp. 324-8-

215 The Rise of the Expert

(Even the Communists, who opposed the New Deal violently from
Z 933 to 1Q35* were able, as we now know, both to infiltrate its ranks
and to exploit the public mood in which it flourished. )

The primary manifestation of the changed position of intellectuals
was the creation of the brain trust, which was almost constantly in the
news during the first few years of the New Deal. Conspicuous brain
trusters like Raymond Moley, Rexford Guy Tugwell, and Adolph A.
Berle, who were most often under attack, were symbols of the hun
dreds of obscurer men who staffed federal agencies, notably the pro
teges of Felix Frankfurter who came to Washington from Harvard. In
the earliest days of the New Deal President Roosevelt himself enjoyed
such prestige that it was psychologically more natural and strategically
easier for his opponents to strike at him through those around him by
suggesting that he was accepting ideas from sinister or irresponsible
advisers. Among other things, the brain trust became useful to the
President as a kind of lightning rod. Much invective that might other
wise have fallen directly upon him as the central figure of the New
Deal fell instead upon those around him and they could be shifted, if
the going got rough, into more obscure positions.

After the early eclipse of Raymond Moley, Professor Rexford Guy
Tugwell became the favorite target for conservative critics of the New
Deal. It was TugwelTs misfortune to believe in some forms of planning
and to have written several books expounding his ideas. His nomina
tion as Undersecretary of Agriculture in June, 1934 brought a wave of
protest against the exaltation of so sinister a theorist. "Cotton Ed" Smith
of South Carolina, one of the most implacable mastodons of the Senate,
was so insistent in establishing the point that Tugwell was "not a
graduate of God s Great University" that the Columbia economist had
to go to great lengths to prove himself a true dirt farmer who as a boy
had had plenty of mud on his boots. ("Tell Rex," said F.D.R. to
Henry A. Wallace, "that I was surprised to hear that he was so dirty.")
The diploma needed for agriculture, Smith told the Senate, "is ob
tained by bitter experience, and no man can solve the problems of
agriculture in America but the man who has trodden the wine press of
experience in the field/* ( He was unable to name a single past Secre
tary of Agriculture who met this requirement.) Roosevelt could ap
pease Smith only by appointing as United States Marshal one of
Smith s favored constituents, who had a record of homicide and whom
the President described to the Cabinet as Smith s "favorite murderer.**
On the strength of this trade one professor for one murderer Tug-

THE POLITICS OF DEMOCRACY

well finally won Senate confirmation by a vote of fifty-three to twenty-
foiir.

The bad press Tugwell got became worse wlien his ardent sponsor
ship of pure food and drug legislation caused such influential advertis
ers as the proprietary drug houses to mobilize the press against him.
Even James A. Farley, neither a radical nor an intellectual, winced at
publicity so "raw and uncalled for." The picture of Tugwell painted by
his most ardent critics was two-faced: on one side he was a totally
feckless, academic, impractical theorist (half an inferior pedagogue,
Mencken said, and half a "kept idealist of the New Republic" ); on the
other he was an effective, insidious, subversive force, quite capable of
wreaking major damage on the fabric of society. TugwelTs patience
under fire suggests that the academic man recruited into politics need
not necessarily be thin-skinned. 3

If the brain trust was to serve the opposition as a suitable whipping
boy, it was necessary that its significance as a center of power be
greatly exaggerated. "The T^rain trust/ " said a writer in the Chicago
Tribune, "completely overshadows the Cabinet. It is reputed to have
more influence with the President. ... It has taken the professors
from various colleges to put the Cabinet members in their places at
last merely department heads, chief clerks. On a routine administra
tive matter you go to a Cabinet member, but on matters of policy and
the higher statesmanship you consult the prof essoriat." 4 It is true that
at the very beginning of the New Deal during its first hundred days
a panicky Congress quickly and complaisantly passed a great mass
of legislation that it did not have the time or the will to scrutinize with
the customary care. This left an unusual amount of discretion in legal
draftsmanship and even in policy-making to the inner planning circles
of the New Deal, in which expert advisers, though never controlling,

3 TugwelTs reputation and his role in the New Deal are amply accounted for by
Bernard Sternsher s unpublished doctoral dissertation: Rexford Guy Tugivett and
the New Deal, Boston University, 1957. The debate over his appointment is
instructive: Congressional Record, 73rd Congress, 2nd session, pp. 1115660,
11334-42, 11427-62 (June 12, 13, 14, 1934). See also Arthur Schlesinger, Jr.:
The Coming of the Netv Deal (Boston, 1958), chapter 21; James A. Farley:
Behind the Ballots (New York, 1938), pp. 219-20; H. L. Mencken: "Three
Years of Dr. Roosevelt," American Mercury (March, 1936), p. 264. For further
insight into the position of New Deal experts, see Richard S. KLrkendalTs un
published doctoral dissertation: The New Deal Professors and the Politics of
Agriculture, University of Wisconsin, 1958.

4 Literary Digest, Vol. CXV (June 3, 1933), p. 8. In fact, the brain trust, as an
identifiable organization, was called into being for the 1932 campaign and ceased
to exist when it was over. In speaking of it more loosely, I have followed the usage
of contemporaries.

-217 The Rise of the Expert

were decidedly influential. However, the structure of power in the
United States makes it impossible for many vital decisions to be made
for very long by a small portion of the professoriat -without roots in
any basic class interest or political constituency. As the mood of panic
passed, the normal processes of Congressional scrutiny returned and
limited the influence of the technical advisers. For the most part, the
steps taken under the New Deal which pleased the intellectuals and
the experimenters were taken not because the experts favored them but
because some large constituency wanted them. The brain trusters
served the public often very well but they did not govern it. With
few exceptions, the more idealistic and experimental schemes of the
liberal brain trusters were circumvented, circumscribed, or sabotaged.
It is true that the New Deal tried some unsuccessful inflationary mone
tary experiments advocated by a few academic theorists. But these
were backed by immensely powerful inflationist pressures in the Sen
ate, and they were not dear to the hearts of most of Roosevelt s expert
advisers. On vital issues, the liberal experts almost invariably lost. The
liberal theorists, led by Jerome Frank, who tried to represent the in
terests of the consumers in the NBA and of sharecroppers in the AAA
were soon driven out. Rexford TugwelTs imaginative ideas for rural
resettlement were crippled beyond recognition, and Tugwell himself
was eventually consigned to the outer regions. Raymond Moley, who
fell into conflict with Secretary of State Cordell Hull over the London
Economic Conference, lost out to the Cabinet member. 5

None the less, the notion became widely current that the professors
were running things, and a veritable brain -trust war began -which re
awakened and quickened the old traditions of anti-intellectualism. The
professors were not running things and yet there was some kernel of
truth in the popular notion that they were: they did represent some
thing new in the constellation of power in the United States. They did
not wield a great deal of power themselves, in the sense that it did not
rest with them to make the central decisions. But upon those who did
wield power they exercised a pervasive and vital influence, for it had
now become a prerogative of experts to set the very terms in which the
issues were perceived, to define the contours of economic and social
issues. The right wingers who denounced professors and brain trusters,
however cranky their conceptions of the world of power, thus had a

5 For detailed information on the manner in which the proposals of professors
were blunted in one area by business power, see the work by Kirkendall already
cited.

THE POLITICS OF DEMOCRACY

sound instinct. And if they did not have the ear of the majority of the
public, they did at least have on their side some of the old weapons of
popular prejudice, which they soon began to brandish. Moreover, the
celebrity the professors enjoyed for a time enabled them to overshadow
old-line politicians and businessmen, who found it particularly galling
that a class of men hitherto so obscure and so little regarded should
eclipse them in the public eye and make their role in society seem so
much less significant. With his usual bald exaggeration, H. L. Mencken
saw the irony of the transformation: "A few years ago all the New Deal
Isaiahs were obscure and impotent fellows who flushed with pride
when they got a nod from the cop at the corner; today they have the
secular rank of princes of the blood, and the ghostly faculties of cardinal
archbishops/ The brain trusters, he continued, were so successful that
they had begun to believe in their own panaceas. "What would you
do," he asked, 6

if you were hauled suddenly out of a bare, smelly school-room,
wherein the razzberries of sophomores had been your only music,
and thrown into a place of power and glory almost befitting
Caligula, Napoleon I, or J. Pierpont Morgan, with whole herds of
Washington correspondents crowding up to take down your every
wheeze, and the first pages of their newspapers thrown open to
your complete metaphysic?

The critics of the New Deal exaggerated the power of the intellec
tuals and also portrayed them as impractical, irresponsible, conspira
torial experimentalists, grown arrogant and publicity-conscious be
cause of their sudden rise from obscurity to prominence. Choosing
comment almost at random from the Saturday Evening Post, an un
impeachable source of anti-intellectualism, one finds them character
ized thus: 7

A bunch of professors hauled from their classrooms and thrust
into the maelstrom of the New Deal. Very self-conscious; arrogant
seekers after publicity for themselves now they have a chance to

6 H. L. Mencken: "The New Deal Mentality," American Mercury, Vol. XXXVIII
(May, 1936), p. 4-

7 Samuel G. Blythe: "Kaleidoscope,** Saturday Evening Post, Vol. CCVI (Sep
tember 2,, 1933), p. 7; Blythe: "Progress on the Potomac," Saturday Evening
Post, December 2, 1933, p. 10; editorials, Saturday Evening Post, December 9,
*933 5 p- 22,, and April 7, 1934, pp. 24-5; William V. Hodges: "Realities Are
Coming/* Saturday Evening Post, April ai, 1934, p. 5. See also Margaret Culkin
Banning: ^"Amateur Year/* Saturday Evening Post, April 28, 1934; Katherine
Dayton: "Capitol Punishments/* Saturday Evening Post, December 23, 1933.

The Rise of the Expert

get it; eager self -expressionists basking like cats before a fireplace
in their new distinctions. . . . The men who rush about and ask
excitedly: "What* s the dollar going to do?" As if it makes the slight
est difference to them what the dollar does not one of them can
muster a hundred dollars of any sort. . . . Out came the profes
sorial law, modified of course, here and there by non-professorial
meddlers in the halls of Congress, but with plenty of professorial
ideas in them at that. . . . No thoughtful man can escape the con
clusion that many of the brain trust ideas and plans are based on
Russian ideology. . . , Somebody should tell these bright young
intellectuals and professors the facts of business life. The stork does
not bring profits and prosperity, and sound currency does not grow
under cabbages. ... In the end it must be the farmer and the
industrialist, assisted by nature and wisely backed by Government,
who cure their own ills. . . .

Are we so silly, so supine as to permit amateur, self-confessed
experimentalists to take our social and business fabric apart to see
if they cannot reconstruct it in a pattern that is more to their lik
ing? . . . laboratory experiments on the life, liberty and industry
of America. . . . There is a vast difference between an experi
ment made in a test tube and one made on a living nation. That
smacks altogether too much of vivisection . . . men untainted
with any practical experience . . . government by amateurs col
lege boys, irrespective of their age who have drunk deep, per
haps of the Pierian spring, have recently taken some hearty
swigs of Russian vodka . . . the theorist, the dreamer of political
dreams, rainmakers and prestidigitators. . . . Realistic senators
and representatives have no haven but the seclusion of the locker
room. . . .

Defenders of the intellectuals tried to arrive at a more reasonable
estimate of their actual power, and to point out that they could hardly
do worse than the "practical" men they had displaced. Oswald Garri
son Villard, writing in the Nation, welcomed the "complete route of the
practical men," and pointed out that all over the world "the practical
men are utterly at a loss." s Jonathan Mitchell, then a liberal journalist
and a former New Deal adviser, in one of the most thoughtful analyses
of the subject, tried to show that Roosevelt s use of academic experts

8 "Issues and Men, the Idealist Comes to the Front/* Nation, Vol. CXXXVII
(October 4, 1933), P- 37 1- Cf. the same view in the New Republic: "The Brain
Trust" (June 7, 1933X PP- 85-6.

THE POLITICS OF DEMOCRACY 2,2,0

was a natural consequence of the crisis and of the peculiarities of
American administrative life. The professors were not in fact setting
major policies, he wrote, but simply advising about instrumentalities.
In the absence of a class of civil servants trained for such a purpose, the
President s sudden resort to men from outside political or administra
tive circles was almost inevitable. 9 On this count Mitchell was entirely
right. Politicians could not handle the issues raised by the depression;
civil servants of the right type did not exist to cope with them; and most
business leaders seemed worse than useless. As Samuel I. Rosenman
advised the President: "Usually in a situation like this a candidate
gathers around him a group composed of some successful industrialists,
some big financiers, and some national political leaders. I think we
ought to steer clear of all those. They all seem to have failed to produce
anything constructive to solve the mess we re in today. . . . Why not
go to the universities of the country?" x

But Mitchell s analysis might well have been taken by foes of the
New Deal as inflammatory:

What Mr. Roosevelt needed was a neutral, someone who didn t
smell of Wall Street but who, on the other hand, -wouldn t too
greatly scare the wealthy. Moreover, he needed someone who
would have the brains, competence, and willingness to carry
through whatever policies he determined upon. Mr. Roosevelt
chose college professors; there is no other group in the country
which these specifications fit. . . .

We have in America no hereditary land-owning class from
which to recruit our New Deal civil service. Our nearest equiva
lents are the college professors, and the neutral professor in Wash
ington is the element which will decide the New Deal s success or
failure. . . . There was once a time in this country when we did
have a class set apart, to whom others submitted their disputes
without question. That class was the colonial ministers, particularly
of New England. They were generally unconcerned with worldly
things; they regulated their communities with a sterner hand
than Mr. Roosevelt s New Deal is ever likely to employ, and
they gave judgment according to the light they had. . . . The
New England ministers have long since departed, but the college
professors are their collateral heirs. ... In the future, we shall

9 Jonathan Mitchell: "Don t Shoot the Professors! Why the Government Needs
Them," Harpers, Vol. GLXVIII ( May, 1934) > PP- 743, 749-

1 Samuel I. Rosenman: Working with Roosevelt ( New York, 1952), p. 57.

The Rise of the Expert

succeed in building for ourselves a professional American civil
service, supported by its own loyalties and tradition.

None of this could have been expected to appease or reassure the
businessmen, displaced politicians, and other members of the conserva
tive classes, who felt little need for a professional civil service, who
understandably could not believe that the professors were "neutral/
who thought that professors did indeed scare the wealthy, and who
could only have been alarmed at the thought of having any class to
which disputes would be submitted "without question." No answer,
not even an answer couched more moderately than Mitchell s, could
assuage their basic fear, which was not a fear of the brain trust or the
expert, but of the collapse of the world in which they had put their
faith. Among such enemies, the prerogatives offered by the New Deal
to intellectuals and experts only served to confirm old traditions of anti-
intellectualism, and to strengthen them with new suspicions and re
sentments.

The Second World War, like the first, increased the need for experts,
not only the sort the New Deal employed but also men from previously
untapped fields of scholarship even classicists and archaeologists were
suddenly thought important because of their knowledge of the Mediter
ranean area. But when the war ended, the long-delayed revulsion
from the New Deal experience and the war itself swept over the coun
try. For this reaction the battle against the brain trust had laid the
groundwork. With it, the rapprochement between the intellectuals
and the popular democracy once more came to an end.

5

In 1952 Adlai Stevenson became the victim of the accumulated griev
ances against intellectuals and brain trusters which had festered in the
American right wing since 1933. Unfortunately, his political fate was
taken as a yardstick by which liberal intellectuals measured the posi
tion of intellect in American political life. It was a natural mistake to
make: Stevenson had the dimensions and the appeal o a major tragic
hero, and intellectuals identified his cause with their own. After the
embarrassments of the Truman administration, it was refreshing to
listen to his literate style. But more decisive were the overwhelming
differences between Stevenson s manner and the Eisenhower-Nixon
campaign. Strong as the contrast was between Stevenson s flair for the

THE POLITICS OF DEMOCRACY

apt phrase (and his evident ability to work with campaign advisers
who shared it) and the fumbling inarticulateness of Eisenhower s
early political manner, it was heightened by Nixon, with his egregious
"Checkers" speech, his sure touch for the philistine cliche, and his crass
eulogies of his senior partner. Finally, there was the ugly image of
McCarthy, whose contributions to the campaign were all too plainly
welcomed by his party. One does not expect American presidential
campaigns to set a high tone, but the tone of the Republican campaign
of 1952, which by comparison seemed to endow even Tinman s shame
less baiting of Wall Street with a touch of old-fashioned dignity, was
such as to throw into high relief every one of Stevenson s attractive
qualities.

Intellectuals embraced Stevenson with a readiness and a unanimity
that seems without parallel in American history. Theodore Roosevelt,
after all, had had to earn such popularity as he enjoyed among the
intellectuals of his day during a long public career; when he took the
presidency there -were many intellectuals who regarded him with a
mixture of suspicion and amusement; his closest rapport with them
was indeed achieved only after he left the White House; it was
climaxed by the Bull Moose campaign of 1912 and then eclipsed by
his wartime jingoism. Woodrow Wilson, for all his style and his aca
demic origins, was treated by a substantial segment of the intellectual
community with a cold reserve that matched his own manner; many
intellectuals agreed with Walter Lippmann s contemporary diagnosis
of the New Freedom as an ill-conceived, backward-looking movement
designed mainly for small business interests; and finally, Wilson s repu
tation suffered badly from the reaction against the mob-mindedness
of the war years from which the President himself had not been im
mune. Franklin D. Roosevelt, for all the publicity given his brain
trust, disappointed most intellectuals during his first presidential cam
paign, and remained an object of distrust and sharp left-wing criticism
during the early years of the New Deal. The intellectuals did not
greatly warm to him until the very eve of the 1936 campaign, and even
then seemed to love him mainly for the enemies he had made. With
Stevenson it was different: men who had hardly heard of him as
Governor of Illinois, and for whom he was a new star in the firmament
at the time of his nomination in 1952, took him to their hearts at once
upon hearing his acceptance speech. He seemed too good to be true.

At a time when the McCarthyist pack was in full cry, it was hard to
resist the conclusion that Stevenson s smashing defeat was also a

The Rise of the Expert

repudiation by plebiscite of American intellectuals and of intellect it
self. Those intellectuals who drew this conclusion were confirmed by
their critics, among whom there was a great deal of solemn head-
shaking: American intellectuals, it was said, did not feel for or under
stand their country; they had grown irresponsible and arrogant; their
chastening was very much in order. That many intellectuals were hurt
there can be no doubt; but the notion that Stevenson was repudiated
by the public because of his reputation for wit and intellect will not
bear analysis, and the implications of his defeat on this count have been
vastly exaggerated. In 1952, he was hopelessly overmatched. It was a
year in which any appealing Republican could have beaten any Demo
crat, and Eisenhower was more than appealing: he was a national
hero of irresistible magnetism whose popularity overshadowed not only
Stevenson but every other man on the political scene. After twenty
years of Democratic rule, the time for a change in the parties was over
due, if the two-party system was to have any meaning. The Korean
War and its discontents alone provided a sufficient issue for the Repub
licans; and they were able to capitalize on lesser issues like the Hiss
case and other revelations of Communist infiltration into the federal
government, and the discovery of trifling but titillating corruption in
the Truman administration. Stevenson s hopeless position might more
readily have been accepted as such if the Republican campaign, in
which Nixon and McCarthy seemed more conspicuous than Eisen
hower, had not struck such a low note as to stir the -will to believe that
such men must be rejected by the public.

In retrospect, however, there seems no reason to believe that Steven
son s style and wit and integrity were anything but assets in his cam
paign, and that if he had not won a reputation for himself on these
counts his defeat would have been still more complete. The notion that
the greater part of the public was totally immune to the value of his
qualities will not bear even a casual examination. If his personal
qualities had been so unattractive as some admirers and detractors
alike believed, it is hard to understand how he could have won the
governorship of Illinois in 1948 by the largest plurality in the state s
history, or why the Democratic convention should have drafted him
four years later, in spite of his well-publicized reluctance to be nomi
nated, after the merest brief exposure to his eloquent welcoming
speech. ( It was the first draft since Hughes s in 1916, and perhaps the
only draft of a thoroughly reluctant candidate in our political history. )
Even the dimensions of Stevenson s defeat were magnified by the

TBCE POLITICS OF DEMOCRACY

dramatic contrast between his campaign and that of the Republicans.
Twelve years earlier, Wendell Willkie, also running against the great
political hero of the moment, received almost exactly the same per cent
of the pop-alar vote as Stevenson 44.4 to 44.3 and Willkie was con
sidered a leader of exceptionally dynamic qualities. The truth seems to
be that both candidates in 1952 were personally strong, and with
political excitements running high, both drew the voters to the polls in
large numbers. Stevenson in defeat had a larger popular vote than
Truman in his victory of 1948 or Roosevelt in 1944 and 1940. And after
the election his mail was full of letters from people who had voted for
Eisenhower but who expressed their admiration for his campaign and
their wish that circumstances had been different enough to justify
their supporting him.

This is not to deny that something was missing from the "image" in
the now fashionable jargon that Stevenson projected. He knew all too
well the difficulty of taking over the leadership of the Democratic
Party after its twenty years in power. But his reluctance to assume
power though in a certain light it may be taken as creditable was
all too real, and it aroused misgivings. "I accept your nomination and
your program/ he said to the Democratic convention. "I should have
preferred to hear these words uttered by a stronger, a wiser, a better
man than myself." It was not the right note for the times; it made for
uneasiness, and many found it less attractive than Eisenhower s bland
confidence. Stevenson s humility seemed genuine, but he proffered it
all too proudly. One could recognize his ability to analyze public ques
tions with integrity and without deference to the conventional hokum,
and yet remain in doubt as to whether he had that imaginative grasp
of the uses and possibilities of power which, in recent times, the two
Roosevelts had conveyed with the most effective force. ( One cannot,
however, refrain from commenting on the delusive character of the
contrasting impressions given by Eisenhower and Stevenson: Eisen
hower s regime had its merits, but the General, in power, failed to
unite or elevate his party, whereas Stevenson out of power did a great
deal to renew and invigorate his. )

We would be deluded, then, if we attributed Stevenson s defeat to
his reputation for intellectuality, or even if we assumed that this repu
tation was a liability instead of an asset. But for a substantial segment
of the public this quality was indeed a liability; and without any desire
to exaggerate the size or influence of this group, we must examine it,

The Rise of the Expert

for these people are of primary interest to any study of anti-intellectual
imagery.

The quality in Stevenson that excited most frequent attack was not
his intellect as such, but his wit. 2 In this country wit has never been
popular in political leaders. The public enjoys and accepts humor
Lincoln, T.K, and F.D.R. used it to some effect but humor is folkish,
usually quite simple, and readily accessible. Wit is humor intellectual-
ized; it is sharper; it has associations with style and sophistication, over
tones of aristocracy. Repeatedly Stevenson was referred to as a "come
dian" or a "clown" and portrayed in cartoons as a jester with fooFs cap
and bells. Against the somber, angry, frustrating background of the
Korean War, his wit seemed to his detractors altogether out of place;
Eisenhower s dull but solid sobriety of utterance seemed more in keep
ing with the hour. It did Stevenson s supporters little good to point out
that he did not jest about the Korean War itself or about other matters
of solemn moment to the voters. Far from overcoming other handicaps
in his public image, his wit seemed to widen the distance between him
self and a significant part of the electorate. ("His fluent command of
the English language is far above the heads of the ordinary American.")
One of the revealing comments of the campaign was made by a
woman who wrote to the Detroit News that "we should have something
in common with a candidate for President, and that s why I m voting
for General Eisenhower."

Stevenson had been a character witness for Alger Hiss and on this
account was especially vulnerable to the common tandem association
between intellect and radicalism, radicalism and disloyalty. His intel
lectual supporters were easily tarred with the same brush, and the
fact that so many of them came from the East, particularly from Har
vard, was significant in the minds of many critics. HARVARD TELLS
INDIANA HOW TO VOTE, ran a headline in a Chicago Tribune
editorial whose argument was that Stevenson was in the hands of the
Schlesingers, father and son, and Archibald MacLeish, all of whom
were held to have had the most sinister associations. Westbrook Pegler,
who had not forgotten Felix Frankfurter s influence on the New Deal,

2 For information and for the quoted matter in the following paragraphs, which
is taken from editorials and letters to newspapers, I have drawn on George A.
Hage s illuminating unpublished study: Anti-intellectualism in Newspaper Com
ment on the Elections of 182.8 and 1952,, University of Minnesota doctoral disserta
tion, 1958; see the same writer s "Anti-intellectualism in Press Comment 1828
and 1952," Journalism Quarterly, Vol. XXXVI (Fall, 1959), pp. 439-46.

THE POLITICS OF DEMOCRACY

took pains to remind readers that Stevenson, like F.D.IL, had had
Harvard associations. He had spent a few years at Harvard Law School,
where it seemed to Pegler that he must surely have succumbed to
Frankfurter s wiles; Stevenson had been, Pegler thought, "a New Deal
bureaucrat of the most dangerous type intermittently ever since 1933."
Pegler imagined he had noticed an attempt by Stevenson s supporters
and biographers to play down his Harvard connections and his sup
posed left-wing associations; but none of this could conceal from the
vigilant Pegler the fact that "the Springfield wonder boy is serving a
warmed-over version of the leftist political line." As a consequence of
Stevenson s malign Harvard associations, Frankfurter, Hiss, the Schle-
singers, and Stevenson all merged into a single ominous image in
right-wing fantasies.

Other university associations were no better. When a large number
of Columbia University faculty members published a manifesto prais
ing Stevenson and criticizing Eisenhower, then the university s presi
dent, the New York Daily Netos countered with an exposure of al
leged "pinko professors" among the signers. A Midwestern newspaper
more calmly remarked that the opposition of Columbia students and
faculty would work in Eisenhower s favor because everyone knew that
university people "have had their minds infiltrated with strong leftist
Socialistic ideas, as well as with definite Communistic loyalties/ Such
support only damned Stevenson. "Stevenson, the intellectual, must
share the views of his advisers or he would not have selected them. A
vote for Eisenhower, the plain American, is a vote for democracy." Old
resentments against the New Deal were everywhere in evidence among
writers to whom this argument of disloyalty was significant: "We have
strayed far afield from the good old American ways which made this
country great. Our colleges are full of leftists, and these Tbright young
boys want to make this country over into a Tbright new world/ May
we be protected from another four years of New Deal-Fair Deal."

The association of intellectuality and style with effeminacy which I
have remarked on in connection with the reformers of the Gilded Age
reappeared in the 1952 campaign. Here Stevenson was sadly handi
capped, Since his service in both world wars had been in a civilian
capacity, he had nothing to counter Eisenhower s record as a general.
Had he been a boxer, hunter, or soldier like T.R., or a football player
(Eisenhower had this too to his credit), or an artilleryman like Harry
Truman, or a war hero like Kennedy, the impression that he was re
moved from the hard masculine world of affairs might have been

The Rise of the Expert

mitigated. But he was only a gentleman with an Ivy League back
ground, and there was nothing in his career to spare him from the
reverberations this history set up in the darker corners of the American
mind. The New York Daily News descended to calling him Adelaide
and charged that he "trilled * his speeches in a "fruity * voice. His
voice and diction were converted into objects of suspicion "teacup
words," it was said, reminiscent of "a genteel spinster who can never
forget that she got an A in elocution at Miss Smith s Finishing School/
His supporters? They were "typical Harvard lace-cuff liberals," "lace-
panty diplomats," "pornpadoured lap dogs," who wailed "in perfumed
anguish" at McCarthy s accusations and on occasions "giggled" about
their own anti-Communism. Politics, Stevenson s critics were disposed
to say, is a rough game for men. The governor and his f ollowers ought
to be prepared to slug it out. They would do well to take a lesson from
Richard Nixon s "manly explanation of his financial affairs."

Even in quarters where rancor and vulgarity were absent, there
was a frequently stated preference for the "proven ability" of Eisen
hower as compared wi|li Stevenson, who smacked of the "ivory tower."
"On the basis of past performance, I feel we need Eisenhower, the man
of outstanding achievement, rather than Stevenson, the thinker and
orator." Jefferson and John Quincy Adams might well have found a
familiar note in this remark of a partisan: "Eisenhower knows more
about world conditions than any other two men in the country, and he
didn t obtain his knowledge through newspapers and books either."
The theme is unlikely to lose its usefulness. Eight years later, cam
paigning for Nixon and Lodge, Eisenhower himself said of them:
"These men didn t learn their lessons merely out of books and not
even by writing books. They learned these lessons by meeting the
day-in, day-out problems of our changing world." 3

But in the same campaign John F. Kennedy proved what perhaps
should not have had to be proved again that the reading of books^
even the writing of books, is hardly a fatal impediment for a presi
dential aspirant who combines a reputation for mind -with the other
necessary qualities. Kennedy seems to have brought back to presidential
politics the combination of intellect and character shown at the be
ginning of the century by T.R. a combination in which a respect for
intellectual and cultural distinction and a passion for intelligence and
expertise in public service are united with the aggressive and practical
virtues. Stevenson as a campaigner had seemed all sensitivity and

8 The New York Times, November 3, 1960.

THE POLITICS OF DEMOCRACY

diffidence and had appealed to the intellectuals* fond obsession with
their own alienation and rejection; Kennedy, on the other hand, was
all authority and confidence, and he appealed to their desire that intel
lect and culture be associated with power and responsibility. He had
all of Eisenhower s confidence without his passivity; and his victory
over Nixon, despite his religion, his youth, and his relative obscurity
at the time of his nomination, was in good part attributable to his
visibly superior aggressiveness and self-assurance in their television
debates to his show, as T.R. might have said, of the manly virtues.

To most intellectuals, even to many with an ingrained suspicion of
the manifestations of power, the mind of the new President seemed
to be, if hardly profound, at least alert and capacious, sophisticated and
skeptical, and he was quick to convey his belief that in the national
concert of interests the claims of intellect and culture ought to have a
place. Some highly intelligent Presidents before Kennedy Hoover,
for example had been utterly impatient with the ceremonial functions
of the presidency, which seemed to them only a waste of precious
time on trivialities. The Founding Fathers had conceived the office
differently. Many of them understood that the chief of state, above all
in a republican political order, ought to be a personage, and that the
communion between this personage and the public is an important
thread in the fabric of government. Washington himself, whose very
presence contributed to the success of the new government, was a
perfect example of the performance of this function. In the twentieth
century, the American mania for publicity and the development of the
mass media have put a great strain upon the ceremonial and public
side of the presidential office. Franklin D. Roosevelt, through skillful
use of the radio and the press conference, was the first President to
turn the demands of modern publicity into a major asset. Kennedy has
been the first to see that intellectuals and artists are now a sufficiently
important segment of the public to warrant not simply inclusion in the
ceremonial aspects of state but some special effort to command their
loyalty by awarding them a kind of official recognition. The President s
mansion has thus been restored as a symbol: to the great audience its
renovation has been displayed on television; for a smaller but strategic
audience it has become once again a center of receptivity to culture
Robert Frost, e. e. cummings, and Pablo Casals have been welcomed
there. And the idea that power may owe some deference to intellect
has been reaffirmed many times perhaps most impressively by a
memorable dinner for Nobel laureates given in the spring of 1962, at

The Rise of the Expert

winch the President characteristically remarked that there were now
more brains at the White House table than at any time since the days
when Thomas Jefferson dined alone.

Of course, all this -was merely a ceremonial means of recognizing the
legitimacy of a special interest the kind of ceremonial whose func
tion had long been understood, for example, by Irish politicians who
attended Italian festivals or Jewish politicians who went to Irish wakes.
Like the ethnic minorities, the intellectuals were to have their place in
the scheme of public acknowledgment. The interest and pleasure of
the new administration in the ceremonial recognition of culture -was
less important than its sustained search for talent, which brought the
place of expertise in American government to a new high. From time
to time the reputation and recognition of intellect in politics may vary,
but the demand for expertise seems constantly to rise. The Eisenhower
regime, for example, despite its expressed disdain for eggheads and its
pique at their opposition, made considerable strategic use of experts;
and Republican leaders also showed interest in what they called the
"utilisation" of friendly academics. The larger question, to which I
shall return in my final chapter, concerns the relations between ex
perts who are also intellectuals, of whom there are many, and the
rest of the intellectual community; and touches upon the condition of
intellectuals when they find themselves on the fringes of power. One
of the difficulties in the relation of intellect to power is that certain
primary functions of intellect are widely felt to be threatened almost
as much by being associated with power as by being relegated to a
position of impotence. An acute and paradoxical problem of intellect
as a force in modern society stems from the fact that it cannot lightly
reconcile itself either to its association with power or to its exclusion
from an important political role.

PART 4

The Practical Culture

[ 233 3

CHAPTER IX

Business and Intellect

R

.OR at least three quarters of a century business has been stigma
tized by most American intellectuals as the classic enemy of intellect;
businessmen themselves have so long accepted this role that by now
their enmity seems to be a fact of nature. No doubt there is a certain
measure of inherent dissonance between business enterprise and intel
lectual enterprise: being dedicated to different sets of values, they are
bound to conflict; and intellect is always potentially threatening to
any institutional apparatus or to fixed centers of power. But this en
mity, being qualified by a certain mutual dependence, need not take
the form of constant open warfare. Quite as important as the general
grounds that make for enmity are the historical circumstances that
have muted or accentuated it. The circumstances of the industrial
era in America gave the businessman a position among the foes of
mind and culture so central and so powerful that other antagonists
were crowded out of the picture.

Some years ago the business journalist, John Chamberlain, com
plained in Fortune that American novelists have consistently done
rank injustice to American businessmen. In the entire body of modern
American fiction, he pointed out, the businessman is almost always
depicted as crass, philistine, corrupt, predatory, domineering, reaction
ary, and amoral. In a long list of business novels, from Dreiser s
Cowperwood trilogy to the present, Chamberlain could find only
three books in which the businessman was favorably portrayed:
one was by a popular novelist of no consequence; the others were
William Dean Howells s The Rise of Silas Lapham and Sinclair Lewis s

THE PRACTICAL CULTUHE 234

Dodstuorth* But the very transiency of these two exceptions confirms
Chamberlain s complaint. Silas Lapham was written in 1885, before
novelists and businessmen had become solidly alienated; five years
later, Howells published A Hazard of New Fortunes, in which one of
the characteristically saurian businessmen of fiction appears, and he
later wrote some vaguely socialist social criticism. And it was Sinclair
Lewis, after all, who in Babbitt gave the world its archetype of the
small-town, small-business American philistine.

In the main, Chamberlain remarked, the novelists portrait of the
businessman is drawn out of doctrine ( "a dry and doctrinaire attitude/*
he called it) and not out of direct observation of business or out of
an intimate knowledge of businessmen. The perverse intent sug
gested by this charge may be largely a creation of Chamberlain s
fancy. Our society has no unitary elites in which writers and business
men associate on easy terms; and if real live businessmen fail to appear
in the American novel, it is partly because the American writer rarely
appears in the society of businessmen: chances for close observation
are minimal. The hostility is not one-sided but mutual; and it would be
an unenviable task to try to show that the businessman lacks the
instruments of self-defense or retaliation, or that he has not used them.

But Chamberlain s main point stands: the portrait of the business
man offered in the social novel in this country conveys the general
attitude of the intellectual community, which has been at various times
populistic, progressive, or Marxist, or often some compound of the
three. Since the development of industrialism after the Civil War, the
estrangement between businessmen and men of letters has been both
profound and continuous; and since the rise of Progressivism and the
New Deal, the tension between businessmen and liberal intellectuals
in the social sciences has also been acute. In times of prosperity, when
the intellectual community has not been deeply engaged -with political
conflict, it is content to portray businessmen as philistines. In times of
political or economic discontent, the conflict deepens, and the business
men become ruthless exploiters as well. The values of business and
intellect are seen as eternally and inevitably at odds: on the one side,
there is the money-centered or power-centered man, who cares only
about bigness and the dollar, about boosting and hollow optimism; on
the other side, there are the men of critical intellect, who distrust
American civilization and concern themselves with quality and moral

1 "The Businessman in Fiction," Fortune, Vol. XXXVIH (November, 194 8 )>
pp. 134-48.

Business and Intellect

values. The intellectual is well aware of the elaborate apparatus which
the businessman uses to mold our civilization to his purposes and
adapt it to his standards. The businessman is everywhere; he fill* the
coffers o the political parties; he owns or controls the influential press
and the agencies of mass culture; he sits on university boards of
trustees and on local school boards; he mobilizes and finances cultural
vigilantes; his voice dominates the rooms in which the real decisions
are made.

The contemporary businessman, who is disposed to think of himself
as a man of practical achievement and a national benefactor, shoulder
ing enormous responsibilities and suffering from the hostility of flighty
men who have never met a payroll, finds it hard to take seriously the
notion that he always gets his -way* He sees himself enmeshed in the
bureaucratic regulations of a welfare state that is certainly no creation
of his; he feels he is checkmated by powerful unions and regarded
suspiciously by a public constantly piqued by intellectuals. He may also
be aware that in former days in the times, say, of Andrew Carnegie
the great business leader, despite some hostility, was a culture-hero.
In those days businessmen were prominent national figures in their
own right, sages to be consulted on almost every aspect of life. But
since the times of Henry Ford the last of his kind this heroic image
has gone into eclipse. Businessmen figure in the headlines only -when
they enter politics or public administration. A man like Charles E.
Wilson, for example, had ten times as many notices in The New Yorfc
Times when he was Secretary of Defense in 1953 as he had three
years earlier as president of General Motors. 2 Bich men may still be
acceptable in politics John F. Kennedy, Nelson Rockefeller, Averell
Harriman, Herbert Lehman, G. Mermen Williams but these are not
truly businessmen: they are men of inherited wealth, often conspicu
ous for their liberal political views.

At times the businessman may think of himself as having been
stripped of his prestige by the intellectual and his allies, in a hostile
environment created by intellectuals. If so, he overestimates the power
of the intellectuals. In fact, the prestige of the businessman has been
destroyed largely by his own achievements: it was he who created the
giant corporation, an impersonal agency that overshadows his reputa
tion as it disciplines his career; it was his own incessant propaganda
about the American Way of Life and Free Enterprise that made these

2 Mabel Newcomer: The Big Business Executive (New York, 1955), p. 7; on the
declining prestige of executives, see p. 131.

THE PRACTICAL CULTURE 236

spongy abstractions into public generalities which soak up and assimi
late the reputations of individual enterprisers. Once great men cre
ated fortunes; today a great system creates fortunate men. ~

The tension between intellect and business has about it, however,
a land of ungainly intimacy, symbolized in the fact that so many
intellectuals are rebelling against the business families in which they
were reared. An uneasy symbiosis has actually developed between
business and intellect. In the United States, where government has
done far less for the arts and learn fng than in Europe, culture has
always been dependent upon private patronage; it has not been any
less dependent in recent decades, when the criticism of business has
been so dominant a concern of intellectuals. The position of the
critical intellectual is thus a singularly uncomfortable one: in the
interests of his work and his livelihood he extends one hand for the
institutional largesse of dead businessmen, the Guggenheims, Car-
negies, Rockefellers, Fords, and lesser benefactors; but in his concern
for high principles and values his other hand is often doubled into a
fist. The freedom of intellect and art is inevitably the freedom to
criticize and disparage, to destroy and re-create; but the daily neces
sity of the intellectual and the artist is to be an employee, a protege,
a beneficiary or a man of business. This ambiguous relationship
affects businessmen as well. Sensitive of their reputation, fearful and
resentful of criticism, often arrogant in their power, they can hardly
help but be aware that the patronage of learning and art will add to
their repute. To speak less cynically, they are also the heirs of tradi
tional moral canons of stewardship; they often feel a responsibility to
do good with their money. And they are not without a certain respect
for mind; under modern technological conditions, they must, in any
case, more or less regularly call upon mind for practical counsel.
Finally, being rather more human than otherwise, they too have a
natural craving for unbought esteem.

The anti-intellectualism of businessmen, interpreted narrowly as
hostility to intellectuals, is mainly a political phenomenon. But inter
preted more broadly as a suspicion of intellect itself, it is part of the
extensive American devotion to practicality and direct experience
which ramifies through almost every area of American life. With some
variations of details suitable to social classes and historical circum
stances, the excessive practical bias so often attributed only to business
is found almost everywhere in America. In itself, a certain wholesome
regard for the practical needs no defense and deserves no disparage-

237 Business and Intellect

ment, so long as it does not aspire to exclusiveness, so long as other
aspects of human experience are not denigrated and ridiculed, "Prac
tical vigor is a virtue; what has been spiritually crippling in our history
is the tendency to make a mystique of practicality."

If I put business in the vanguard of anti-intellectualism in our culture,
it is not out of a desire to overstate its role. Certainly the debt of
American culture to a small number of wealthy men, patrons of learn
ing and art, is great enough to be thrown immediately into the balance
as a counterpoise. The main reason for stressing anti-intellectualism in
business is not that business is demonstrably more anti-intellectual or
more philistine than other major sections of American society, but
simply that business is the most powerful and pervasive interest in
American life. This is true both in the sense that the claims of practi
cality have been an overweening force in American life and in the
sense that, since the mid-nineteenth century, businessmen have
brought to anti-intellectual movements more strength than any other
force in society. ^This is essentially a business country," said Warren G.
Harding in 1920, and his -words were echoed by the famous remark of
Calvin Coolidge: The business of America is business/ 3 It is this
social preponderance of business, at least before 1929, that gives it a
claim to special attention.

One reason for the success of the argument of American business
against intellect is that it coincides at so many points with the conven
tional folk wisdom. For example, the feeling about intellect expressed
in the businessman s statements about higher education and vocational-
ism was also the popular feeling, as Edward Kirkland has suggested:
the people constantly voted on the educational system by taking their
children out of school or by not sending them to college. We need not
be surprised to find a "radical 5 labor reformer like Henry George ad
vising his son that since college would fill his head with things which
would have to be unlearned, he should go directly into newspaper
work to put himself in touch with the practical world; the same advice
might have come from a business tycoon. 4

3 Warren G. Harding: "Business Sense in Government/* Nations Business,
Vol. VIII (November, 1920), p. 13. Coolidge is quoted, from an address at the
December, 1923 meeting of the American Society of Newspaper Editors, by Wil
liam Allen White: A Puritan in Babylon (New York, 1938), p. 253.
if 4 Edward Kirkland: Dream and Thought in the Business Community, z6o-
(Ithaca, New York, 1956), pp. 8i-.s, 87.

THE PRACTICAL CULTURE 238

f The fear of mind and the disdain for culture, so quicHy evident
wherever the prior claims of practicality are urged in the literature of
business, are ubiquitous themes. They rest upon two pervasive Amer
ican attitudes toward civilization and personal religion first, a widely
shared contempt for the past; and second, an ethos of self-help and
personal advancement in which even religious faith becomes merely an
agency of practicality. ,

Let us look first at the American attitude toward the past, which
has been so greatly shaped by our technological culture. America, as
it is commonly said, has been a country -without monuments or ruins
that is, without those inescapable traces of the ancestral human spirit
with which all Europeans live and whose meanings, at least in their
broadest outlines, can hardly be evaded by even the simplest peasant
or workman. America has been the country of those who fled from the
past. Its population was selected by migration from among those most
determined to excise history from their lives. 5 With their minds fixed
on the future, Americans found themselves surrounded with ample
land and resources and beset by a shortage of labor and skills. They set
a premium upon technical knowledge and inventiveness which would
unlock the riches of the country and open the door to the opulent fu
ture. Technology, skill everything that is suggested by the significant
Americanism, "Itnow-how" was in demand. The past was seen as
despicably impractical and uninventive, simply and solely as some
thing to be surmounted. It should be acknowledged that the American
disdain for the past, as it emerged toward the end of the eighteenth
and the beginning of the nineteenth centuries, had some aspects which
were at the very least defensible and at best distinctly praiseworthy.
What was at stake was not entirely a technological or materialistic
barbarianism which aimed merely to slough off all the baggage of his
tory. Among other things > the American attitude represented a republi
can and egalitarian protest against monarchy and aristocracy and the
callous exploitation of the people; it represented a rationalistic protest
against superstition; an energetic and forward-looking protest against
the passivity and pessimism of the Old World; it revealed a dynamic,
vital, and originative mentality.

5 "It is not indiscriminate masses of Europe/ Emerson thought, "that axe
shipped hitherward, but the Atlantic is a sieve through which only or chiefly the
liberal, adventurous, sensitive, America-loving part of each city, clan, family are
brought. It is the light complexion, the blue eyes of Europe that come: the black
eyes, the black drop, the Europe of Europe, is left." Journals ( 1851; Boston, River
side ed., 191*), Vol. VTII, p.

239 Business and Intellect

But certainly in its consequences, if not in its intentions, this attitude
was anti-culturalult stimulated the development of an intellectual style
in which the past was too often regarded simply as a museum of con
fusion, corruption, and exploitation; it led to disdain for all contempla
tion which could not be transformed into practical intelligence and for
all passion which could not be mobilized for some forward step in
progress. This view of human affairs lent itself too readily to the
proposition that the sum and substance of life lies in the business of
practical improvement; it encouraged the complacent notion that there
is only one defensible way of life, the American way, and that this
way had been willfully spurned or abandoned by peoples elsewhere. 6
Many Americans found the true secret of civilization in the Patent
Office^ An orator at Yale in 1844 told the undergraduates that they
could read the future there: 7

The age of philosophy has passed, and left few memorials of its
existence. That of glory has vanished, and nothing but a painful
tradition of human suffering remains. That of utility has com
menced, and it requires little warmth of imagination to anticipate
for it a reign lasting as time, and radiant with the wonders of un
veiled nature.

Everywhere, as machine industry arose, it drew a line of demarca
tion between the utilitarian and the traditional. In the main, America
took its stand with utility, with improvement and invention, money
and comfor^ It was clearly understood that the advance of the machine
was destroying old inertias, discomforts, and brutalities, but it was not
so commonly understood that the machine was creating new dis
comforts and brutalities, undermining traditions and ideals, sentiments
and loyalties, esthetic sensitivities i Perhaps the signal difference be
tween Europe and America on this count is that in Europe there always
existed a strong counter-tradition, both romantic and moralistic, against
the ugliness of industrialism a tradition carried on by figures as di-

6 Cf . Thomas Paine in The Rights of Man; "From the rapid progress which Amer
ica makes in every species of improvement, it is rational to conclude that, if the
governments of Asia, Africa, and Europe had begun on a principle similar to that of
America, or had not been very early corrupted therefrom, those countries rnust by
this time have been in a far superior condition to what they are/* Writings, ed. by
Moncure D. Conway ( New York, 1894), Vol. II, p. 402.

7 Arthur A. Ekirch: The Idea of Progress in America, 2815-1860 (New York,
1944), p. 126. I am indebted to chapter 4 for its documentation of the American
faith in technology, though I feel that the author is slightly amiss in speaking of it
simply as faith in science, for it is largely applied science which is involved. The
-whole work is iUurninating on the American mentality before the Civil War.

THE PRACTICAL CULTURE

verse as Goethe and Blake, Morris and Carlyle, Hugo and Chateau
briand, Rusldn and Scott. Such men counterposed to the machine a
passion for language and locality, for antiquities and monuments, for
natural beauty; they sustained a tradition of resistance to capitalist
industrialism, of skepticism about the human consequences of indus
trial progress, of moral, esthetic, and humane revolt.

I do not mean to suggest that there were no American counterparts.
Some writers did protest against complacent faith in improvement,
though one senses among them a poignant awareness of their futility
and isolation, of their opposition to the main stream. Nathaniel Haw
thorne might complain, as he did in the preface to The Marble Faun,
of the difficulties of writing in a country "where there is no shadow.,
no antiquity, no mystery, no picturesque and gloomy wrong, nor any
thing but a commonplace prosperity, in broad and simple daylight";
Herman Melville might warn, as he did in Clarel, of

Man disennobled brutalized
By popular science

and answer scientific progressivism with: "You are but drilling the new
Hun"; Henry Adams might later view the American scene with ironic
detachment and detached resignation but none of these men
imagined himself to be a representative spokesman. Thoreau s Walden
was, among other things, a statement of humane protest, a vision of the
dead men, the lost life, buried under the ties of the railroads. He was
immune to the American passion for the future; he was against the
national preference for movement, expansion, technology, and utility.
"The whole enterprise of this nation/* he wrote in i853, 8

which is not an upward, but a westward one, toward Oregon,
California, Japan, etc., is totally devoid of interest to me, whether
performed on foot, or by a Pacific railroad. It is not illustrated by a
thought, it is not warmed by a sentiment; there is nothing in it
which one should lay down his life for, nor even his gloves
hardly which one should take up a newspaper for. It is perfectly
heathenish a filibustering toward heaven by the great western
route. No; they may go their way to their manifest destiny, which
I trust is not mine.

In a somewhat similar spirit, the conservative classicist and Orientalist,
Tayler Lewis, objected that America boasted of its individualism while
8 Writings, (Boston, 1906), Vol. VI, p. aio (February 2,7, 1853).

Business and Intellect

encouraging "mediocre sameness" in its utilitarian education. "When
may we look for less of true originality," he asked, ~than at a time
when every child is taught to repeat this inane self-laudation, and
all distinction of individual thought is lost, because no man has room for
anything else than a barren idea of progress, a contempt for the past,
and a blinding reverence for an unknown future?" 9 But only a vocifer
ous minority concurred with these protests. Andrew Carnegie, who
spoke of "an ignorant past whose chief province is to teach us not
what to adopt, but what to avoid *; the oil magnate who saw no value
in having students "poring over musty dead languages, learning the
disgusting stories of the mythical gods, and all the barbarous stuff of
the dead past"; James A. Garfield, who did not want to encourage
American youth to "f eed their spirits on the life of dead ages, instead of
the inspiring life and vigor of our own times"; Henry Ford, who told
an interviewer that "history is more or less bunk. It s tradition"
such men were in the main stream. 1

When a representative American voice is raised, there is a good
chance that sooner or later this feeling of condescension toward the ma-
chineless past, this note of hope in technological progress will assert
itself. Mark Twain, whose voice is one of the most authentic of all, is
a case in point. Many years ago, in a memorable passage in his brilliant
book, The Ordeal of Mark Twain., Van Wyck Brooks reproached
Mark Twain because "his enthusiasm for literature was as nothing
beside his enthusiasm for machinery: he had fully accepted the illusion
of his contemporaries that the progress of machinery was identical
with the progress of humanity." Quoting Twain s raptures on the
Paige typesetting machine, which the writer considered superior to
anything else produced by the human brain, Brooks went on to cite
the perversity of Twain s letter to Whitman on the poet s seventieth
birthday, in which the author congratulated Whitman for having lived
in an age of manifold material benefactions, including "the amazing,
infinitely varied and innumerable products of coal-tar," but neglected
to recognize that the age was remarkable also for having produced
Walt Whitman. 2

In this, as in so many of his other perceptions about Mark Twain,

9 Ekirch: op. cit., p. 175.

1 Kirkland: op. cit., pp. 86, 106; Irvin G. Wyllie: The Self-Made Man in
America (New Brunswick, New Jersey, 1954), p. 104. Ford s explanation of his
remark was an illuminating one: **I did not say it was bunk. It was bunk to me, , . .
I did not need it very bad." Allan Nevins: Ford: Expansion and Challenge, 1915

33 (New York, 1957) 9 p- 138.

2 The Ordeal of Mark Twain (New York, 1920), pp. 146-7.

THE PRACTICAL CULTURE

Brooks seems essentially right. But the letter would not have seemed so
exceptionable to Whitman himself. More than thirty years earlier,
Whitman had written, in very much the same vein: 3

Think of the numberless contrivances and inventions for our
comfort and luxury which the last half dozen years have brought
forth of our baths and ice houses and ice coolers of our fly traps
and mosquito nets of house bells and marble mantels and sliding
tables of patent ink-stands and baby jumpers of serving ma
chines and street-sweeping machines in a word give but a pass
ing glance at the fat volumes of Patent Office Reports and bless
your star that fate has cast your lot in the year of our Lord 1857.

Mark Twain is especially interesting in this because he refracted
with extraordinary fidelity the concerns of the technocratic mind. I say
refracted, not embodied, because he was too much a moralist and a
pessimist to imagine that mechanical progress was an all-sufficient
end. He was a man of contradictions, and few men have more pas
sionately embraced the values of business industrialism and at the
same time more contemptuously rejected them. His most extended
commentary on technical progress, A Connecticut Yankee in King
Arthur s Court, juxtaposes a nineteenth-century technical Yankee mind
with a sixth-century society to satirize both civilizations. The moral
burden of this tale is that human rascality and credulity will prevail
even over mechanical progress; but within the dialectic of the story
all the advantages lie with the Connecticut Yankee, who establishes a
benevolent dictatorship on the strength of his command of steam
power and electricity. "The very first official thing I did, in my ad
ministration and it was on the very first day of it, too was to start a
patent office; for I knew that a country without a patent office and
good patent laws was just a crab, and couldn t travel any way but
sideways or backways." 4 Of course, Twain was somewhat ambivalent
about his Yankee hero; although he may have been, as Henry James
tartly remarked, a writer for rudimentary minds, he was not so rudi
mentary as to be unaware of at least some of the limitations of the
industrial tinkerer. 5 None the less, it is the Connecticut Yankee who

3 Emory Holloway and Vernolian Schwarz, eds.: I Sit and Look Out: Edi
torials from the Brooklyn Daily Times (New York, 1932), p. 133.

4 A Connecticut Yankee ( 1889; Pocket Book ed., 1948 ) , p. 56.

* Speaking to Dan Beard about the illustrations for the book, he said: "You know,
this Yankee of mine has neither the refinement nor the weakness o a college educa
tion; he is a perfect ignoramus; he is boss of a machine shop; he can build a locomo-

243 Business and Intellect

enjoys mental and moral superiority and with whom we are expected
to sympathize. Mark Twain s national amour-propre was engaged in
the book he wrote Ms British publisher that the work was written
not for America but for England; that it was an answer to English
criticisms of America (particularly, though he did not say so, to those
of Matthew Arnold), an attempt to "pry up the English nation to a
little higher level of manhood/ Such intentions as he may have had
to satirize mankind in general and, more particularly, Yankee in
dustrialism were in effect swallowed up in this impulse to justify what
later came to be called the American way of life. Despite a few side
swipes at modern American abuses, the book is mainly a response to
Europe and the past, to a society characterized entirely by squalor,
superstition, cruelty, ignorance, and exploitation. If it was Mark
Twain s intention to be equally satirical about sixth-century and nine-
teenth-century society, his execution was at fault. But it is easier to
believe that his animus ran mostly in one direction; this interpretation
accords better with his raptures over the Paige machine, which he
hoped would make millions but on which he lost thousands. It accords
better with the tone of The Innocents Abroad, in which the author
confessed that he cared more for the railroads, depots, and turnpikes
of Europe than for all the art in Italy, "because I can understand the
one and am not competent to appreciate the other." 6 It may help,
too, to illuminate one aspect of the long, anticlimactic sequence near
the end of Huckleberry Finn, in which Tom Sawyer, enamored of the
outworn heroics of European romances, insists that Nigger Jim be
rescued from captivity by what he conceives to be the only proper
method, with all its cumbersome rituals, and overrules Huck Finn s
untutored common- sense proposals. This extravagant burlesque has
been much condemned as a distraction from the fundamental moral
drama of the book, but for Mark Twain it had a vital importance* Tom
Sawyer represents the impracticality of traditional culture, and Huck
stands for the native American gift for coming to grips with reality.

Mark Twain gave voice to what was undoubtedly a widespread Amer
ican ambivalence. Its main tenet was a robust faith in the patent

tive or a Colt s revolver, He can put up and run a telegraph line, but he s an igno
ramus, nevertheless." Gladys Carmen Bellamy: Mark Twain as a Literary Artist
(Norman, Oklahoma, 1950), p. 314*

6 The Innocents Abroad ( 1869; New York ed., 1906), pp.

THE PRACTICAL CULTURE 244

office and the future; but a great many Americans, along with Mark
Twain, also felt a certain respectful and wistful regard for the genteel
culture that flourished largely in the East. (Clemens s own desire to
"make good" with this culture and yet somehow to flout it led to one
of the most painful, confrontations in all our history the terrible fiasco
of his Whittier birthday speech. ) This culture had its limitations, but
during the greater part of Mark Twain s life, it was the only high cul
ture the country knew. To a considerable degree, it leaned upon the
support of a commercial class.

In the absence of either a strong hereditary aristocracy or state
patronage, the condition of art and learning in America was dependent
upon commercial wealth, and on this account the personal culture of
the American business class was always a matter of special importance
to intellectual life. From the beginning, America was, of necessity, a
work-bound society, but even in the middle of the eighteenth century a
material basis for art and learning had been created in the seaboard
towns, and foundations had been laid for a kind of mercantile society
with an interest in culture. As early as 1743 Benjamin Franklin, out
lining a plan for intercolonial co-operation in promoting science, ob
served: "The first drudgery of settling new colonies which confines the
attention of people to mere necessaries is now pretty well over; and
there are many in every province in circumstances that set them at
ease, and afford leisure to cultivate the finer arts and improve the
common stock of knowledge/* 7 In the coastal towns, which were even
then among the largest in the British empire, the mercantile and
professional class was seriously interested in the advancement of learn
ing, science, and the arts, and it was this class that established a model
for patronage in the New World.

The backbone of this class was mercantile wealth wealth, it is
important to say, in the hands of men who did not invariably consider
the pursuit of business and the accumulation of money an all-sufficient
end in life. By some businessmen business is considered to be a way of
life; by others, a way to life, a single side of a many-sided existence,
possibly only a means to such an existence. Among the latter, retire
ment after the accumulation of a substantial fortune is at least a con
ceivable goal. Andrew Carnegie, an exceptional man among his genera
tion of millionaires, gave lip service to this ideal, even though he did

7 Smyth, ed.: Writings (New York, 1905-07), Vol. II, p. 2.28.

Business and Intellect

not quite live up to it. At thirty-three, when he was making $50,000
a year, he wrote: s

To continue much longer overwhelmed by business cares and
with most of my thoughts wholly upon the way to make more
money in the shortest time, must degrade me beyond the hope
of permanent recovery. I will resign business at thirty-five.

Severely business-minded men, to whom this would have made no
sense, have always existed in America. But the ideal that Carnegie was
expressing did have considerable power. The old-fashioned merchant
in Boston, New York, Philadelphia, or Charleston was a versatile and
often a cosmopolitan man. Mercantile contacts with Europe and the
Orient led his mind outward. The slow pace of business transactions
in the days of the sailing ship, which was so soon speeded up by the
increasing rapidity of mid-nineteenth century communication, made
the successful pursuit of business consistent with a life of dignified
leisure. In the relatively stratified society of the late eighteenth cen
tury a significant proportion of the upper business classes were men of
inherited wealth and position, who brought to their mercantile roles
the advantages of breeding, leisure, and education. Moreover, eight
eenth-century merchants were often actively involved in politics; their
concerns with officeholding, legislating, and administering, as well as
business, made for versatility in action and a reflective turn in thought.
The early nineteenth century inherited this ideal of the man of
business as a civilized man and a civilizing agent. Spokesmen of this
ideal did not feel any inconsistency in preaching at the same time the
Puritan values of dedication to work, frugality, and sobriety, and the
gentlemanly ideals of leisure, culture, and versatility. This view o life
is expressed in the columns of the leading mercantile journal, Hunt s
Merchants 9 Magazine. 9 Its publisher and editor, Freeman Hunt, the

8 Burton J. Hendrick: The Life of Andrew Carnegie (New York, 1932), Vol. I,
pp. 146-7. Compare with this the surprise frequently expressed by American busi
nessmen at their European counterparts who hope to accumulate enough to retire
as soon as possible. Francis X. Sutton, et al. : The American Business Creed ( Cam
bridge, Mass., 1956), p. 102.

9 On examining the sketches of businessmen collected in Freeman Hunt s Worth
and Wealth: A Collection of Maxims, Morals,, and Miscellanies for Merchants and
Men of Business (New York, 1856), I have been struck by the breadth of qualities
sought for in the good merchant, and by the coexistence of three constellations of
virtues. The first are the classic Puritan virtues, having to do with the development
and discipline of the individual, and expressed in such terms as ambitious, frugal,
economical, industrious, persevering, disciplined, provident, diligent, simple. The

THE PRACTICAL CXJLTXJHE 246

son of a Massachusetts shipbuilder, had come to his business, like so
many other nineteenth-century publishers, from the printer s trade,
He combined in his person the intellectualism and mercantile in
heritance of New England with the practical experience of the self-
made man; his father s death when Hunt was still a child had made it
necessary for "him to find his own way. The opening issue of Hunt s
monthly journal in 1839 portrayed commerce as a high vocation that
elevates the mind, enlarges the understanding, and adds "to the store
house of general knowledge/ "One of our prominent objects," he
wrote, "will be, to raise and elevate the commercial character." He
stressed the importance of "probity, and that high sense of honor,
wanting which, however abounding in everything else, a man may
assume the name, and be totally deficient in all that forms the high
and honorable merchant." Commerce, too, was "a profession embracing
and requiring more varied knowledge, and general information of the
soil, climate, production, and consumption of other countries of
the history, political complexion, laws, languages, and customs of the
world than is necessary in any other. . . ." He took upon himself
the duty of maintaining the intellectual and moral level of the trade.
Wherever the minds of the young are to be formed [to take the places
of the old merchants] they will find us ... doing all in our power to
aid the incipient merchant in his high and honorable avocation." 1
One of his books was significantly entitled Wealth and Worth. Later
writers frequently reiterated the idea that "commerce and civilization
go hand in hand." For many years Hunt s magazine ran an extensive
"literary department * in which books of general intellectual interest

second are the mercantile-aristocratic virtues, having to do with the elevation of
business and society, and expressed in such terms as upright, generous, noble,
civilizing, humane, benevolent, veracious, responsible, liberal, suave, gentlemanly,
moderate. The third might be considered categorically good attributes for almost
any undertaking: clear, explicit, decisive, careful, attentive, lively, -firm.

^The Merchants 9 Magazine and Commercial Review, Vol. I (July, 1839), pp.
1-3; between 1850 and 1860 the title of the periodical was changed to Hunt s
Merchants Magazine. For further passages of interest, see Vol. I, pp. 2,00 2,,
289-302, 30314, 399 4!3- Jerome Thomases, writing on "Freeman Hunt s Amer
ica," Mississippi Valley Historical Review, Vol. XXX (December, 1943), pp. 395-
407, attempts to assess the influence of the magazine, which was considerable. He
touches on the theme I have emphasized, but also points out how much the maga
zine preached the principles of work, practicality, and self-reliance. It seems a
significant token of the extent to which the image of the merchant had established
itself as an ideal among businessmen that in New York, by 1850, "bankers, capi
talists, brokers, commercial lawyers, railroad speculators, and manufacturers re
ferred to themselves as merchants." Philip S. Foner: Business and Slavery ( Chapel
Hill, 1941 ), p. viL

247 Business and Intellect

were discussed. Lectures delivered under the auspices of the New
York Mercantile Library Association were reported. A clergyman s
article on "Leisure Its Uses and Abuses" was considered important
enough to publish. An article on "Advantages and Benefits of Com
merce" pointed out that "in every nation whose commerce has been
cultivated upon great and enlightened principles, a considerable pro
ficiency has been made in liberal studies and pursuits." What is essen
tial here is that the role of the merchant was justified not solely on the
ground that he is materially useful, nor even on the honor and probity
-with which he pursues his vocation, but also because he is an agent of a
more general culture that lies outside business itself. 2

The old mercantile ideal, with its imposing set of practical, moral,
and cultural obligations, may seem to have been difficult to live up to,
but enough men, especially in the large seaboard towns, were capable
of living up to it to keep it alive and real. One thinks, for example, of
the immensely wealthy and powerful Appleton brothers of Boston,
Samuel (1776-1853) and Nathan (1779-1861). Samuel, who was
active in politics as well as business, chose to retire from business at
sixty, and to devote the rest of his life to philanthropy. He patronized
colleges and academies, learned societies, hospitals, and museums with
an open hand. His brother Nathan, who was actively interested in
science, politics, and theology, was helpful to the Boston Athenaeum,
the Massachusetts Historical Society, and other cultural organizations;
he once said that the $200,000 he had made in trade would have
satisfied him had he not gone into the cotton industry by chance. The
grandfather of Henry and Brooks Adams, Peter Chardon Brooks
(1767-1849), whose three daughters married Edward Everett, Na
thaniel Frothingham, and the elder Charles Francis Adams, was suffi
ciently detached from trade to retire at thirty-six (he returned to it
for a few years later on) and devote his time to public offices, philan
thropy, and the political careers o two of his sons-in-law. Men like
these, though assiduous in business, were capable of detaching them
selves from it. The ideal o civilized accomplishment never ceased to
glimmer in their minds. Emerson s eloquent tribute to John Murray

2 Sigmund Diamond has observed that the early nineteenth-century entre
preneur was commonly judged by society on the basis of the personal use he made
of his wealth, whether philanthropic or economic. In the twentieth century it be
came more common to look at business enterprise as a system, and not to judge it by

its philanthropic by-products. The Reputation of the American Businessman (Cam
bridge, Mass., 1955), PP. 178-

THE PRACTICAL CULTURE 248

Forbes (18131898), the versatile and cultivated merchant and rail
road entrepreneur, is a token of the rapprochement that was possible
between intellectuals and the best representatives of the mercantile
ideal: 3

Wherever he moved he was the benefactor. It is of course that
he should ride well, shoot well, sail well, keep house well, ad
minister affairs "well; but he was the best talker, also, in the com
pany. . . . Yet I said to myself, How little this man suspects, with
his sympathy for men and his respect for lettered and scientific
people, that he is not likely, in any company, to meet a man
superior to himself. And I think this is a good country, that can
bear such a creature as he is.

In New York the pre-eminent example of the mercantile ideal was
the famous diarist, Philip Hone ( 1780-1851 ) . Hone s experience shows
how capable a well-knit local aristocracy was of absorbing a gifted
newcomer, for no one lived more fully the life of the civilized merchant
than thfs parvenu, who began life as the son of a joiner of limited
means. At nineteen Hone went into an importing business with an
older brother. At forty he retired with a fortune of half a million and
went off upon a grand tour of Europe. Hone had had no schooling
beyond the age of sixteen, but unlike the typical self-made man he did
not make a virtue of the circumstance. "I am sensible of my deficiency/*
he wrote in 1832, "and would give half I possess in the -world to enjoy
the advantages of a classical education." 4 But in his case the lack of
formal education was balanced by an enormous appetite for experi
ence. Over the years he collected an extensive library and read widely
and intelligently, acquired a small but good collection of works of art,
became a patron of the opera and the theater, a preceptor of New
York society, a trustee of Columbia, and a sponsor of innumerable
philanthropies. His home became a meeting-place for writers, actors,
and diplomats, as well as leading politicians. He was active in politics;
he served as assistant alderman and for one brief term as mayor of New-
York, and played a significant role as the host and counselor of Whigs
like Webster, Clay, and Seward. His culture, like that of many men
of his kind, may have been rather derivative and genteel; but, without

3 Letters and Social Aims (Riverside ed.), p. ^01. There are many interesting
sidelights on Forbes in Thomas C. Cochran: Railroad Leaders, 2845-3:890 (Cam
bridge, Mass., 1953).

4 Quoted by Allan Nevins in the Introduction to The Diary of Philip Hone
(New York, 1936), p. x.

Business and Intellect

the patronage and interest of such men, American cultural and intel
lectual life would have been considerably impoverished.

* 4

The lives of merchants like Forbes and Hone may be taken to discount
the statement of Tocqueville that "there is no class ... in America
in which the taste for intellectual pleasures is transmitted with heredi
tary fortune and leisure, and by which the labors of the intellect are
held in honor/* 5 But for Tocqueville the word "hereditary" was no
doubt vital; and it was a matter of consequence that the Hones and the
Forbeses were in the main unable to propagate their social type. This
had begun to be evident even by the third decade of the nineteenth
century, -when Tocqueville visited the United States and wrote his
great commentary; it became increasingly evident in the subsequent
decades. With the relative decline in the importance of commerce and
the rise in manufacturing, a smaller part of the business community
-was exposed to the enlarging, cosmopolitan efiFects of overseas trade.
The American economy and the American mind began to face inward
and to become more self-contained. With the rapid inland spread of
business into the trans- Allegheny region and the Middle West, cultural
institutions and leisured habits of mind were left behind. Men and ma
terials could move faster than institutions and culture. The breakdown
of class barriers and the opening of new business opportunities for the
common man meant that the ranks of business and society were filling
with parvenus, whose tastes and habits tended increasingly to domi
nate society. In earlier days, especially in the seaboard cities, estab
lished local aristocracies had been strong enough to absorb and mold
and train parvenus like Hone. In the new cities of the interior, which
had been wilderness when thriving cultures were centered in Boston,
New York, and Philadelphia, the new men and the descendants of
aristocracy mingled on even terms; and in many of them it was the
parvenus who leveled the gentlemen down. Of course, some of the
inland towns, such as Cincinnati and Lexington, managed in their own
way to become cultural centers, but their efforts were relatively feeble.
In inland society the newly successful businessmen had less need or
opportunity to temper themselves and to elevate their children through
marriage into an established professional and business aristocracy such
as one found in Boston. Everything was new and raw.
5 Democracy in America, ( 1835; New York, 1898), Vol. I, p. 66.

THE PRACTICAL CULTURE 250

It was not only new and raw, but increasingly unstable and hazard
ous. Even such a man as Hone was hurt by the instability of the
times. In the 1830*8 he lost perhaps as much as two-thirds o his
fortune, and after his reverses drove him back into business, he "was
unable to repeat his earlier successes. Fortunes were easily made and
unmade in the uncommonly speculative ethos of American business.
The pace of transactions was stepped up; business became increasingly
specialized. The between-times leisure often possible in the past for
importers whose business was attuned to the pace of Atlantic crossings
did not exist for men faced with new threats or new opportunities at
almost every turning. Business needed more tending. Men of business
"withdrew, to some degree, from their previous direct involvement in
politics as officeholders, and to a much greater degree from cultural
life. In 1859 Thomas Colley Grattan, a British traveler, observed of
young American businessmen: 6

They follow business like drudges, and politics with fierce ardour.
They marry. They renounce party-going. They give up all preten
sion in dress. They cannot force wrinkles and crow s feet on their
faces, but they assume and soon acquire a pursed-up, keen, and
haggard look. Their air, manners, and conversation are alike con
tracted. They have no breadth, either of shoulders, information,
or ambition. Their physical powers are subdued, and their mental
capability cribbed into narrow limits. There is constant activity
going on in one small portion of the brain; all the rest is stagnant.
The money-making faculty is alone cultivated. They are incapable
of acquiring general knowledge on a broad or liberal scale. All is
confined to trade, finance, law, and small, local provincial infor
mation. Art, science, literature, are nearly dead letters to them.

At the same time, the cultural tone of business publications fell
off. Hunt s magazine, whose literary department had been fairly con
spicuous and serious, allowed this feature to dwindle. During and
after 1849, the book reviews that had once taken about eight pages in
each issue shrank to four or five, then to two and a half pages of per
functory notices, and finally disappeared altogether from the penul
timate volume in 1870. At the end of that year the magazine itself
was merged with the Commercial and Financial Chronicle. Hunt s
Merchants 9 Magazine had been a monthly; its successor was a weekly.

6 Civilized America (London, 1859), Vol. II, p. 3^0; see, however, the writer s
misgivings, expressed in the same passage.

Business and Intellect

The increasing speed of business communication, the publishers ex
plained in the last issue of the older journal, had made that kind of
business monthly out of date. 7 Its successor was also intelligently
edited, but such nods as it gave to literature were few and far be
tween.

The more thoroughly business dominated American society, the less
it felt the need to justify its existence by reference to values outside
its own domain. In earlier days it had looked for sanction in the claim
that the vigorous pursuit of trade served God, and later that it served
character and culture. Although this argument did not disappear, it
grew less conspicuous in the business rationale. As business became
the dominant motif in American life and as a vast material empire rose
in the New World, business increasingly looked for legitimation in a
purely material and internal criterion the wealth it produced. Amer
ican business, once defended on the ground that it produced a high
standard of culture, was now defended mainly on the ground that it
produced a high standard of living. 8 Few businessmen would have
hesitated to say that the advancement of material prosperity, if not

7 Hunt s Merchants Magazine, Vol. LXIII, pp. 4013. A cultural history of the
business magazines might be illuminating. The first article in the first issue of Hunt s
Merchants Magazine was entitled "Commerce as Connected with the Progress of
Civilization," Vol. I (July, 1839), pp. 3-20; it was written by Daniel D. Barnard,
an Albany lawyer and politician -who also wrote historical brochures and who later
became minister to Prussia. Barnard s essay dwelt on "the humanizing advantages
of a growing and extended commerce/ Cf. Philip Hone: "Commerce and Com
mercial Character," Vol. IV (February, 1841), pp. 129-46. Another writer in the
opening volume, to be sure, made note of "an opinion [that] very generally pre
vails among the mercantile classes of the present day, that commerce and literature
are at war with each other; that he who is engaged in the pursuit of the one must
entirely abandon the pursuit of the other/ This writer announced his intention to
confute this view and his confidence that "more liberal views . . . are fast growing
upon the public mind." "Commerce and Literature/* Vol. I (December, 1839), p.
537- This confidence seems hardly justified by the trend in the cultural fare of
Hunt s itself, which grew thinner during the 1850*3. One must, no doubt, be care
ful not to assume too readily from such evidence that the cultural interests of busi
nessmen were declining. What does seem to be true, however, is that for these men,
in their character as businessmen, cultural interests no longer seemed so vital; nor
did it seem any longer so important to vindicate business by reference to its civiliz
ing influence.

8 Francis X. Sutton, et aL, in their study of The American Business Creed find
material productivity a dominant theme; see chapter 2, and pp. 2556. In so far as
non-material values are advanced by business, they are the values of "service,"
personal opportunity, and political and economic freedom. Some businessmen are
disposed to argue that success is sufficient justification for more or less complete
neglect of "self-improvement/* Ibid., p. 276. Small businessmen, though expressing
a special proprietorship in freedom and democracy, along with a resentment of big
business, seem to have absorbed the general business emphasis on material produc
tivity as a central vindication. See John H. Bunzel: The American Smatt Business
man ( New York, 1962 ) , chapter 3.

THE PRACTICAL CULTURE

itself a land of moral ideal, was at least the presupposition of all other
moral ideals. In 1888 the railroad executive, Charles Elliott Perkins,
asked: 9

Have not great merchants, great manufacturers, great inventors,
done more for the world than preachers and philanthropists? . - .
Can there be any doubt that cheapening the cost of necessaries
and conveniences of life is the most powerful agent of civilization
and progress? Does not the fact that well-fed and well-warmed
men make better citizens, other things being equal, than those
who are cold and hungry, answer the question? Poverty is the
cause of most of the crime and misery in the world cheapening
the cost of the necessaries and conveniences of life is lessening
poverty, and there is no other way to lessen it, absolutely none.
History and experience demonstrate that as wealth has accumu
lated and things have cheapened, men have improved ... in
their habits of thought, their sympathy for others, their ideas of
justice as well as of mercy. . . . Material progress must come first
and . . . upon it is founded all other progress.

Almost a century and a half after Franklin had considered the material
foundations of cultural progress to have been established, the necessity
of the material prerequisites was thus being asserted with greater
confidence than ever.

9 Edward C. Kirldand: Dream and Thought in the Business Community., 1860
1900, p. 1645. This conservative economic materialism has its curious parallel to
day in the thought of radical apologists for dictatorships in backward countries. Let
poverty, misery, and illiteracy be conquered, it is held, and the goods of political
freedom and cultural development will follow soon enough. This argument was
commonly invoked in defense of the Soviet Union in the Stalinist period, and one
hears it again today from apologists for Fidel Castro and others.

[ 2,53 ]
CHAPTER X

Self-Help
and Spiritual Technology

A

. s THE mercantile ideal declined, it was replaced by the ideal of
the self-made man, an ideal which reflected the experiences and
aspirations of countless village boys who had become, if not million
aires, at least substantial men of business. Modern students of social
mobility have made it incontestably clear that the legendary American
rags-to-riches story, despite the spectacular instances that adorn our
business annals, was more important as a myth and a symbol than as a
statistical actuality. 1 The topmost positions in American industry, even
in the most hectic days of nineteenth-century expansion, were held for
the most part by men who had begun life with decided advantages.
But there were enough self-made men, and their rise was dramatic
and appealing enough, to give substance to the myth. And, quite aside
from the topmost positions, there were intermediate positions, repre
senting success of a substantial kind; only a few could realistically
hope to be a Vanderbilt or a Rockefeller, but many could in a
smaller way imitate their success. If life was not a movement from rags
to riches, it could at least be from rags to respectability; and the
horizons of experience were scanned eagerly for clues as to how this
transformation could be accomplished.

-, 1 For a summary and evaluation of the now considerable literature on social
mobility in American history, see Bernard Barber : Social Stratification ( New York,
1957), chapter 16; Joseph A. Kahl: The American Class Structure (New York,
1957), chapter 9; Seymour M. Lipset and Reinhard Bendix: Social Mobility in
Industrial Society (Berkeley, 1959), chapter 3.

THE PRACTICAL CULTURE 254

Moreover, if the self-made men of America were not self-made in
the sense that most of them had started in poverty, they were largely
self-made in that their business successes were achieved without the
benefits of formal learning or careful breeding. Ideally, the self-made
man is one -whose success does not depend on formal education and
for whom personal culture, other than in his business character, is
unimportant. By mid-century, men of this sort had come so clearly to
dominate the American scene that their way of life cried out for
spokesmen. Timothy Shay Arthur, the Philadelphia scribbler who is
best known to history as the author of Ten Nights in a Barroom and
What I Saiv There, but who was also well known in his day as a moral
ist and self-help writer, pointed out in 1856 that "in this country, the
most prominent and efficient men are not those who \vere born to
wealth and eminent social positions, but those who have won both
by the force of untiring personal energy." To them, Arthur insisted,
the country was indebted for its prosperity. 2

Invaluable, therefore, are the lives of such men to the rising
generation. . . . Hitherto, American Biography has confined itself
too closely to men who have won political or literary distinction.
. . . Limited to the perusal of such biographies, our youth must, of
necessity, receive erroneous impressions of the true construction
of our society, and fail to perceive wherein the progressive vigor of
the nation lies. . . . We want the histories of our self-made man
spread out before us, that we may know the ways by which, they
came up from the ranks of the people.

The idea of the self-made man -was not new. It was a historical out
growth of Puritan preachings and of the Protestant doctrine of the
calling. Benjamin Franklin had preached it, but it is significant that
his own later life was not lived in accordance with his catchpenny
maxims. After making a modest fortune, he was absorbed into the
intellectual and social life of Philadelphia, London, and Paris, and
interested himself more in politics, diplomacy, and science than in
business. The self-made man as a characteristic American type became
a conspicuous figure early in the nineteenth century. Apparently the

2 Quoted in Freeman Hunt: Worth and Wealth (New York, 1856), pp. 3501.
Only a few years earlier the London Daily News remarked: "It is time that the
millionaire should cease to be ashamed of having made his own fortune. It is time
that parvenu should be looked on as a word of honor." Sigmund Diamond: The
Reputation of the American Businessman ( Cambridge, Mass., 1955), p. 2.

255 Self-Help and Spiritual Technology

term was first used by Henry Clay in 1832, in a Senate speech on a
protective tariff. Denying that the tariff would give rise to a hereditary
industrial aristocracy, he maintained, to the contrary, that nothing
could be more democratic; it would give further opportunities for men
to rise from obscurity to affluence. "In Kentucky, almost every manu
factory known to me is in the hands of enterprising and self-made men,
who have acquired whatever wealth they possess by patient and
diligent labor." 3 By the time of Clay s death thirty years later, the
type was more than recognizable, it was spiritually dominant.

I say spiritually without ironic intent. Irvin G Wyllie, in his il
luminating study, The Self-Made Man in America,, points out that the
literature of self-help was not a literature of business methods or tech
niques; it did not deal with production, accounting, engineering, ad
vertising, or investments; it dealt with the development of character,
and nowhere were its Protestant origins more manifest- Not surpris
ingly, clergymen were prominent among the self-help writers, and
especially Congregational clergymen. 4 Self-help was discipline in char
acter. The self-help literature told how to marshal the resources of the
tvill how to cultivate the habits of frugality and hard work and the
virtues of perseverance and sobriety. The writers of self-help books
imagined that poverty in early life was actually a kind of asset, be
cause its discipline helped to produce the type of character that
would succeed.

The conception of character advocated by the self-help writers and
the self-made men explicitly excluded what they loosely called genius.
No doubt there was a certain underlying ambivalence in this who
does not desire or envy "genius"? But the prevailing assumption in the
self-help literature was that character was necessary and remarkable
talents were not; still more, that those who began by having such
talents would lack the incentive or the ability to develop character.
The average man, by intensifying his good qualities, by applying com
mon sense to a high degree, could have the equivalent of genius,
or something much better. "There is no genius required," said one
New York merchant. "And if there were, some great men have said
that genius is no more than common-sense intensified." Reliance on
outstanding gifts would lead to laziness and lack of discipline or re
sponsibility. "Genius" was vain and frivolous. Speaking on this subject

3 Daniel Mallory, ed.: The Life and Speeches of the Hon. Henry Clay (New
York, 1844) , Vol. II, p. 31-

4 Wyllie: The Self -Made Man in America (New Brunswick, New Jersey, 1954),
chapters 3 and 4.

THE PRACTICAL GTJX-TURE 256

to an audience of young men in 1844, Henry Ward Beecher re
marked: 5

So far as my observations have ascertained the species, they
abound in academies, colleges, and Thespian societies; in village
debating clubs; in coteries of young artists and young professional
aspirants. They are to be known by a reserved air, excessive sensi
tiveness, and utter indolence; by very long hair, and very open
shirt collars; by the reading of much wretched poetry, and the
writing of much, yet more wretched; by being very conceited,
very affected, very disagreeable, and very useless: beings whom
no man wants for friend, pupil, or companion.

Through the decades, this suspicion of genius or brilliance rooted
itself into the canons of business. Eighty years after Beecher s char
acterization of genius, an article appeared in the American Magazine
under the title, "Why I Never Hire Brilliant Men." The writer identi
fied brilliance in business with mercurial temperament, neuroticism,
and irresponsibility; his experience as an entrepreneur with men of
this type had been disastrous. "Even fine material, carelessly put to
gether, will not make a fine shoe," he remarked. "But if material which
is of just average quality is fashioned with special care and attention,
It will result in a quite superior article/ "So I took most of my raw-
material from our delivery wagons, or other places right at hand.
Out of this hard-muscled, hard-headed stuff I have built a business
that has made me rich according to the standards of our locality."
Somewhat defensively, the writer anticipated that he might be con
sidered simply a mediocre man without the capacity to appreciate
anyone better than himself. This judgment might well be justified, he
said candidly, 6

for I am mediocre. But . . . business and life are built upon suc
cessful mediocrity; and victory comes to companies not through
the employment of brilliant men, but through knowing how to get
the most out of ordinary folks. . . .

I am sorry to forego the company of [brilliant] men in my rather
dingy building here in the wholesale grocery district. But I comfort
myself with the thought that Cromwell built the finest army in
Europe out of dull but enthusiastic yeomen; and that the greatest

5 Ibid., pp. 35-6-

6 Anon.: "Why I Never Hire Brilliant Men/* American Magazine, Vol. XCVH
(February, 19^4), pp. 12, 1x8,

2,57 Self -Help and Spiritual Technology

organization in Imman history was twelve humble men, picked up
along the shores of an inland lake.

With all this there went a persistent hostility to formal education
and a countervailing cult of experience. The canons of the cult of
experience required that the ambitious young man be exposed at the
earliest possible moment to what one writer called "the discipline of
daily life that comes with drudgery. 7 Formal schooling, especially if
prolonged, would only delay such exposure. The lumber magnate,
Frederick Weyerhaeuser, concluded that the college man was "apt
to think that because he is a college graduate he ought not be obliged
to commence at the bottom of the ladder and work up, as the office
boy does who enters the office when he is fourteen years of age." 7
It must be said that here the writers of self-help books disagreed with
the businessmen: they usually advised more formal schooling, but
this part of their prescription was not convincing to the self-made man
of business. In the ranks of business, opinion on free common schools
was divided between those who felt that such schools would create a
more efficient and disciplined working class and those who balked
at taxes or believed that education would only make workers dis
contented. 8

On two matters there was almost no disagreement: education should
be more "practical"; and higher education, as least as it -was conceived
in the old-time American classical college, was useless as a back
ground for business. Business waged a long, and on the whole success
ful, campaign for vocational and trade education at the high-school
level and did much to undermine the high school as a center of liberal
education. The position of the Massachusetts wool manufacturer who
said that he preferred workers with only a common-school education,
since he considered that the more learned were only preparing them
selves for Congress, and who rejected educated workmen on the
ground that he could not run his mill with algebra, was in no way
unusual or extreme; nor was the argument of the industrial publicist
Henry Carey Baird, the founder of the first publishing firm in America
specializing in technical and industrial books. "Too much education of
a certain sort," he protested in i885, 9

7 Charles F. Thwing: "College Training and the Business Man," North American
Review, Vol. CLXVII (October, 1903), p. 599.

8 On attitudes toward education, see Wyllie: op. cit., chapter 6; Kirkland: Dream
and Thought in the Business Community, 18601900 (Ithaca, New York, 1956),
chapters 3 and 4; Merle Curti: The Social Ideas of American Educators (New York,
1935), chapters.

9 Kirkland: op. cit., pp. 69-70.

THE PRACTICAL CTTLTURE 258

such as Greek, Latin, French, German, and especially bookkeep
ing, to a person of humble antecedents, is utterly demoralizing in
nine cases out o ten, and is productive of an army of mean-
spirited "gentlemen" -who are above what is called a "trade" and
who are only content to follow some such occupation as that of
standing behind a counter, and selling silks, gloves, bobbins, or
laces, or to "keep books.** . . . Our system of education, as fur
nished by law, when it goes beyond what in Pennsylvania is called
a grammar school, is vicious in the extreme productive of more
evil than good. Were the power lodged with me, no boy or girl
should be educated at the public expense beyond what he or she
could obtain at a grammar school, except for some useful occupa
tion. "The high school" of today must, as I believe, under an en
lightened system, be supplanted by the technical school, with
possibly "shops" connected with it. ... We are manufacturing
too many "gentlemen" and "ladies," so called, and demoralization
is the result.

The extension of classical and liberal studies through the college
years was often considered even worse than academic schooling at the
high-school level, because it prolonged the youth s exposure to futile
studies and heightened his appetite for elegant leisure. One business
man rejoiced that his son s failure in college-entrance examinations
had spared the boy all this. "Whenever I find a rich man dying and
leaving a large amount of money to found a college, I say to myself,
*It is a pity he had not died while he was poor/ " x

Fortunately, many influential businessmen did not wholly share this
attitude. Old Cornelius Vanderbilt was often considered the acme of
self-satisfied ignorance, and the story is told that when a friend re
ported to him Lord Palmerston s remark that it was too bad that a
man of his ability had not had the advantages of formal education,
Vanderbilt replied: "You tell Lord Palmerston from me that if I had
learned education I would not have had time to learn anything else."
None the less, Vanderbilt s wealth had brought him into a society in
-which his lack of culture was a staggering handicap (he is reported
to have read one book in his life, Pilgrim s Progress, and that at an
advanced age). "Folks may say that I don t care about education," he
confessed to his clergyman, "but I do. I ve been to England, and seen
them lords and other fellows, and knew that I had twice as much

1 Ibid., p. 101.

259 Self-Help and Spiritual Technology

brains as they had maybe, and yet I had to keep still, and couldn t
say anything through fear of exposing myself." When his son-in-law
entered the room in time to catch this remark, and chided the Com
modore for having at last made such an admission, Vanderbilt beat a
retreat: "I seem to get along better than half of your educated men/
Still, he had said to his minister: *Td give a million dollars today,
Doctor, if I had your education* ; and in the end precisely this magnifi
cent sum was extracted from him for the support of what became
Vanderbilt University. 2

Andrew Carnegie, it is reported, once saw the older and much
richer Vanderbilt on the opposite side of Fifth Avenue, and mumbled
to his companion: "I would not exchange his millions for my knowledge
of Shakespeare." 3 But Carnegie shared, at a higher level, the mixture
of feelings about education that Vanderbilt had shown. "Liberal edu
cation," he once wrote, "gives a man who really absorbs it higher tastes
and aims than the acquisition of wealth, and a world to enjoy, into
which the mere millionaire cannot enter; to find therefore that it is
not the best training for business is to prove its claim to a higher
domain/ 4 Carnegie s munificent gifts to education and his evident
pleasure in the company of intellectuals protect him from the charge
that such utterances were hypocritical. And yet he took delight in
demonstrating how useless higher education was in business; much as
he praised "liberal education," he had nothing but contempt for the
prevailing liberal education in American colleges. He enjoyed reciting
the names of other successful men who had gone through a tough
apprenticeship like his own, and in recording the evidences of the
superiority of non-college men to college men in business. "College
education as it exists seems almost fatal to success in that domain/
he wrote. 5 On the classical college curriculum he was unsparing. It
was a thing on which men "wasted their precious years trying to ex
tract education from an ignorant past whose chief province is to teach
us, not what to adopt, but what to avoid/ Men had sent their sons to
colleges "to waste their energies upon obtaining a knowledge of such
languages as Greek and Latin, which are of no more practical use to
them than Choctaw" and where they were "crammed with the details

2 W. A. Croffut: The Vanderbilts and the Story of Their Fortune (Chicago and
New York, 1886), pp. 137-8.

3 Burton J. Hendrick: The Life of Andrew Carnegie (New York, 1932), VoL I,
p. 60.

4 The Empire of Business ( New York, 1902), p. 113.

5 Wyllie: op. cit., pp. 96-104.

THE PRACTICAL CULTURE 260

of petty and insignificant skirmishes between savages." Their education
only imbued them with false ideas and gave them "a distaste for
practical life." "Had they gone into active work during the years spent
at college they would have been better educated men in every true
sense of that term." 6 Leland Stanford was another educational philan
thropist who had no faith in existing education. Of all the applicants
for jobs who came to him from the East, the most helpless, he said,
were college men. Asked what they could do, they would say "any
thing^ while in fact they had "no definite technical knowledge of
anything," and no clear aim or purpose. He hoped that the university
he endowed would overcome this by offering "a practical, not a
theoretical education/ 7

One must, of course, be careful about the conclusions one draws
from anyone s dislike of the classical curriculum as it was taught in the
old college; many men of high intellectual distinction shared this feel
ing. The old college tried to preserve the Western cultural heritage
and to inculcate a respectable form of mental discipline, but it was
hardly dedicated to the vigorous advancement of critical intellect.
The rapid advancement of scientific knowledge, the inflexibility of the
old curriculum in the hands of its most determined custodians, and the
dismal pedagogy that all too often prevailed in the classical college,
did more to undermine the teaching of classics than the disdain of
businessmen. To the credit of men like Carnegie, Rockefeller, Stan
ford, Vanderbilt, Johns Hopkins, and other millionaires, it must be
added that their support made possible the revamping of the old-time
college and the creation of universities in the United States. But if one
looks closely into business pronouncements on education, one finds a
rhetoric which reveals a contempt for the reflective mind, for culture,
and for the past.

Around the turn of the century the attitudes of businessmen toward
formal education as a background for business success underwent a
conspicuous change. The rapid development of large-scale business in
the last two decades of the nineteenth century had made the char
acteristic big-business career a bureaucratic career. By their very suc
cess the self-made men rapidly made their own type obsolete. How-

6 The Empire of Business, pp. 7981; cf. pp. 145-7.

7 Kirkland: op. cit., pp. 934.

26 1 Self -Help and Spiritual Technology

ever reluctantly, men began to see that the ideal of the uneducated
self-made man, especially in the most desirable business positions,
was coming to have less and less reality. Formal education, it had to be
admitted, was a distinct asset for the more stable careers now being
followed in bureaucratic businesses: the need for engineering, ac
countancy, economics, and law grew from the changes in business or
ganization itself. Hence, although the "school of experience" and the
"college of hard knocks" still kept their nostalgic appeal for business
spokesmen, the need for formally inculcated skills had to be recog
nized. "The day has quite gone by/* the Commercial and Financial
Chronicle recognized in 1916, "when it is sufficient for a young man to
begin at the bottom and, without more training than he can gather in
the daily routine, to grow up to be something more than a manager
of an existing concern, or to acquire that breadth of knowledge and
completeness of training which are necessary if he is to be fitted to
compete with the expert young business men produced in other coun
tries." The steel magnate, Elbert H. Gary, considered that the more
the businessman knew "of that which is taught in schools, colleges
and universities of a general character, the better it will be for him in
commencing business," s

This new acceptance of education was reflected in the background
of men who stood at the helm of the great corporations. The generation
of corporation executives that flourished from 1900 to 1910 was only
slightly better educated than the generation of the 1870*5 . 9 But the
rising young executives of the first decade of the new century were
being recruited out of the colleges. In Mabel Newcomer s sample of
top business executives, 39.4 per cent of those chosen from 1900 had
some college education; but in 1925 this figure rose to 51.4 per cent
and in 1950 to 75.6 per cent. 1 In 1950, about one of every five execu-

8 Wyllie: op. cit., p. 113; see pp. 10715 for a good brief account of changing
business attitudes toward education after 1890.

9 See Frances W. Gregory and Irene D. Neu: "The American Industrial Elite in
the 1870*8: Their Social Origins/ in William Miller, ed.: Men in Business (Cam
bridge, Mass., 1952), p. 203, comparing the generation of the 1870*8 with that of
19011910 encompassed by William Miller in "American Historians and the Busi
ness Elite/ The Journal of Economic History, Vol. IX ( November, 1949), PP- 184
208. In the 1870*8, 37 per cent of the executives had some college training; in 1901
1910, 41 per cent had. On the emergence of the bureaucratic business career, see
Miller s essay: "The Business Elite in Business Bureaucracies/ in Men in Business,
pp. 286-305.

1 Mabel Newcomer: The Big Business Executive (New York, 1955), p. 69, In
1950, the author concludes (p. 77), "it is accepted that the college degree is the
ticket of admission to a successful career with the large corporation, even though
the initial employment for the college graduate may be manual labor." Joseph A.

THE PRACTICAL CULTURE 262.

tives had also had some training in a graduate school (mainly in law
or engineering).

I Although these figures show that the once cherished model of the
self-made man was being relinquished., they cannot be taken as show
ing a rise in esteem for the liberal arts. The colleges themselves,
under the elective system, became more vocational. In the nineteenth
century, when the -well-to-do sent their sons to college, it was a fair
assumption that they were sending them not for vocational training
but out of a regard both for intellectual discipline and for social advan
tages (the two are not always easily distinguishable). In the twen
tieth century, they may send them, rather, for the gains measurable
in cold cash which are supposedly attainable through vocational
training. (Among male college graduates in 1954-55, the largest single
group was majoring in business and commerce; they outnumbered
the men in the basic sciences and the liberal arts put together.) 2
A sign of the increasing vocational character of American higher
education was the emergence of both undergraduate and graduate
schools of business. The first of these was the Wharton School at the
University of Pennsylvania, founded in 1881; the second was founded
at the University of Chicago eighteen years later. There followed an
efflorescence of such schools between 1900 and 1914. The early busi
ness schools were caught between the hostility of the academic facul
ties and the lingering suspicion of businessmen, who were sometimes
still inclined to doubt that any kind of academic training, even that
acquired in a business school, could be of practical use. Like almost
every other kind of educational institution in America, the business
schools quickly became heterogeneous in the quality of their faculties
and students and in the degree to which they included the liberal arts
in their curriculums. Thorstein Veblen dealt scathingly with these
"keepers of the higher business animus/* suggesting mischievously that
they were on a par with the divinity schools in that both were equally
extraneous to the intellectual enterprise which is the true end of the

Kahl^has suggestively remarked in his study of The American Class Structure, p. 93,
that "if one should demand a single oversimplified distinction underlying class dif
ferences in contemporary America to replace the outworn one of Marx, the answer
would be this : the possession of a college degree."

Employers sometimes still show a certain ceremonial loyalty to the ideal of the
self-made man by putting a new employee, clearly destined for an executive posi
tion, through a quick ascending series of minor posts. This is called learning the
business from the bottom up, and is especially recommended for the sons or sons-in-
law of high executives.

2 William H. Whyte, Jr. : The Organization Man ( Anchor ed., 1956 ) , p. 88.

2,63 Self-Help and Spiritual Technology

university, Abraham Flexner, acknowledging in his famous survey of
the universities that business-school faculties sometimes recruited dis
tinguished men, considered their heavily vocational curriculums to be
in the main beneath the dignity of the academic enterprise. 3 Within
the universities,, business schools were often non-intellectual and at
times anti-intellectual centers dedicated to a rigidly conservative set of
ideas. When Dean Wallace Donham of the Harvard Graduate School
of Business suggested to one such school in the Middle West that it
offer a course on the problems of trade unionism, he was told: "We
don t want our students to pay any attention to anything that might
raise questions about management or business policy in their minds." 4
The condition of American business today, as it is reflected in
William H. Whyte s celebrated study of the social and cultural aspects
of large business organization, displays a pattern recognizably similar
to that of the past^Gone is the self-made man, of course. He may be
cherished as a mythological figure useful in the primitive propaganda
battles of politics, but every sensible businessman knows that in the
actual recruitment and training of big business personnel it is the
bureaucratic career that matters. Yet in this recruitment and training
the tradition of business anti-intellectualism, quickened by the self-
made ideal, remains very much alive. It no longer takes the form of
ridiculing the value of college or other formal education in preparation
for business, but of selective recruiting governed by narrow vocational
principles. Here it is important to note, as Whyte does, that top busi
ness executives do not characteristically defend these vocational prin
ciples. When they make pronouncements on the subject, at commence
ment exercises or elsewhere, they usually speak of the importance of
liberal education, broad training,, and imaginative statecraft in the
business world. There is little reason to doubt their sincerity. Most
of them, although they are enormously hard-working and too pre
occupied to keep their own general culture very much alive, are better
educated than their subordinates, and they are disposed to lament
mildly their own intellectual stagnation. They have begun to organize
arts courses for their junior executives and to sponsor meetings be-

3 Thorstein Veblen: The Higher Learning in America (New York, 1918), p. 204;
Abraham Flexner; Universities: American, English, German (New York, 1930),
pp. 162-72.

4 Peter F. Drucker: "The Graduate Business School/ Fortune, Vol. XLIE
(August, 1950), p. 116. For a general account of these schools and their problems,
see L. C. Marshall, ed.: The Collegiate School of Business (Chicago, 19^8); and
Frank C. Pierson et. al.: The Education of American Businessmen: A Study of
University-College Programs in Business Administration (New York, 1959)

THE PRACTICAL CTTLTUHE

tween intellectuals and businessmen. In this way, the old mercantile
regard for culture as a sanction for business life is beginning to be
revived. However, the news about their concern for the liberally
educated man does not seem to filter down to the ranks of the per
sonnel men who turn up each year on the college campuses to recruit
talent. At this point of leverage, the overwhelming pressure of business
on American higher education is severely vocational.

The preference for vocationalism is linked to a preference for char
acter or personality over mind, and for conformity and manipula
tive facility over individuality and talent. "We used to look primarily
for brilliance/* said one president, who must have been speaking of the
past history of an idiosyncratic firm. "Now that much-abused word
character has become very important. We don t care if you re a Phi
Beta Kappa or a Tau Beta Phi. We want a well-rounded person who
can handle well-rounded people/ A personnel manager reports that
"any progressive employer would look askance at the individualist and
would be reluctant to instill such thinking in the minds of trainees."
A trainee agrees: "I would sacrifice brilliance for human understanding
every time/ Mr. Whyte tells us, in a chapter entitled "The Fight
against Genius/* that even in the field of industrial science this code
prevails; that industrial scientists are shackled by the commitment to
applied knowledge; that a famous chemical company s documentary
film, made to recruit scientists for the firm, shows three of its research
men conferring in a laboratory while the narrator announces: "No
geniuses here; just a bunch of average Americans working together";
that the creativity of industrial scientists is pathetically low as com
pared with that of the men in the universities; and that when the word
brilliant appears, it is commonly coupled with such words as erratic,
eccentric, introvert, and screwball. 5 }

As late nineteenth-century America became more secular, traditional
religion became infused with, and in the end to some degree dis
placed by, a curious cult of religious practicality. If we are to accept
the evidence of a long history of best-selling handbooks, from Russell
H. ConwelTs "Acres of Diamonds" to the works of Norman Vincent
Peale, this cult has had millions of devotees. It has become, by all
internal evidence and everything we know about its readership, one

5 Ibid., pp. 150, 152, 2,2,7-8, 2,33, 235, and chapter 16 passim.

265 Self -Help and Spiritual Technology

of the leading faiths of the American middle class. It is, as I hope
to show, a rather drastically altered descendant of the older self-help
literature, but it affords, in any case, striking evidence of the broad
diffusion in American society of the practical motif. Modern inspira
tional literature takes its stand firmly with the world: what it has to
offer is practical. "Christianity" writes Norman Vincent Peale, "is
entirely practical. It is astounding how defeated persons can be
changed into victorious individuals when they actually utilize their
religious faith as a workable instrument. * 6

The literature of inspiration is of course ; by no means confined to
America; it flourishes wherever the passion for personal advancement
has become so intense that the difference between this motive and
religious faith has been obscured. There has always been in Christian
civilization a conviction that the world of business and that of
religion must somehow be related, if only through their hostility or ten
sion, since both have to do with morals, character, and discipline. At
first, the negative relation was most clear: medieval prohibitions or
limitations on usury expressed the conviction that it was a part of the
task of the Church in the world to restrain economic exploitation.
Later, the Puritan doctrine of the calling suggested another more posi
tive relationship: diligence in business was one of the ways of serving
God. Success or failure in business might then be a clue as to an
individual s spiritual condition. But over the years this relationship
gradually became reversed. The distinction between service to God
and service to self broke down. ^Vhereas business had been an instru
ment in religious discipline, one of the various means of serving God,
religious discipline now became an instrument in business, a way o
using God to a worldly end. And whereas men had once been able to
take heart from business success as a sign that they had been saved,
they now took salvation as a thing to be achieved in this life by an ef
fort of will, as something that would bring with it success in the pursuit
of worldly goals. Religion is something to be used. Mr. Peale tells his
readers that his work demonstrates "a simple, workable technique of
thinking and acting/* It "emphasizes scientific spiritual principles
which have been demonstrated in the laboratory of personal ex
perience." "The best place to get a new and workable idea for your
business is in the type of church service described in this chapter." "If
you will practice faith, you can be healed of ill-will, inferiority, fear,
guilt, or any other block which impedes the flow of recreative energy.

6 A Guide to Confident Living (New York, 1948), p. 55.

THE PRACTICAL CTJLTTJRE

Power and efficiency are available to you if you will believe.** 7 As
H. Richard Niebuhr has remarked, there is a strain in modern Ameri
can theology which "tends to define religion in terms of adjustment to
divine reality for the sake of gaining power rather than in terms of
revelation which subjects the recipient to the criticism of that which is
revealed/* The consequence is that "man remains the center of religion
and God is his aid rather than his judge and redeemer ." 8
1 The older self-help literature, whatever its faults, had some organic
relation both to the world of affairs and to the religious life. It assumed
that business success is to a very large degree the result of character,
and that character is formed by piety. It was in this way a natural,
if intellectually simple, response to the historical convergence of
Protestant moral imperatives, the doctrines of classical economics, and
a fluid, open society. American society, as most modern studies of the
subject show, is still fluid; but the conditions of success have changed:
success now seems more intimately related to the ability to seize upon
formal training than it does to the peculiar constellation of character
traits that figured so prominently in the old self-help books. An early
nineteenth-century businessman, queried as to what "discipline" made
for success, might well have answered: "The discipline of poverty and
the school of hard knocks/ or "The discipline of frugality and indus-
triousness." The modern businessman, faced with the same query, is
likely to answer: "Well, law is excellent, but engineering is pretty good

Modern inspirational literature builds upon the old self-help tradi
tion and bears a general resemblance to it, but it also has major
differences J| In the old self-help system, faith led to character and
character to a successful manipulation of the world; in the new system,
faith leads directly to a capacity for self-manipulation, which is be
lieved to be the key to health, wealth, popularity, or peace of mind.
On the surface, this may seem to indicate a turning away from the
secular goals of the older self-help books, but it actually represents a
turning away from their grasp of reality, for it embodies a blurring of
the distinction between the realms of the world and the spirit) In the
old literature these realms interacted; in the new they become vaguely
fused. The process represents, I believe, not a victory for religion but a
fundamental, if largely unconscious, secularization of the American

7 Ibid., pp. viii, 14, 108, 148, 165.

8 "Religious Realism in the Twentieth Century," in D. C. Macintosh, ed.: Reli
gious Realism ( New York, 1931 ) , pp. 425-6.

^6/ Self-Help and Spiritual Technology

middle-class mind. Religion has been supplanted, not, to be sure, by a
consciously secular philosophy, but by mental self -manipulation, by a
kind of faith in magic. Both religion and the sense of worldly reality
suffer. It is easy to believe that rising young businessmen actually
turned to the old self-help literature for a kind of rough guidance to the
requisites of the business world, however little actual help they may
have got. Today the inspirational literature seems to be read mainly
by "defeated persons/ 7 to use Peale*s words, and not as much by men
as by women, who, though affected by the practical code of business,
do not actually enter business life.

It is what Raymond Fosdick calls "power for daily living" that the
success writers purport to give. In the nineteenth century the primary
promise of success writers was that religion would bring wealth. Since
the early 1930*5 there has been a growing emphasis on the promise of
of mental or physical health; inspirational writing has been infused
with safe borrowings from psychiatry and has taken on a faint colora
tion from the existential anxieties of the past twenty years. Although
success literature has given way to a literature of inspiration, its goals
largely remain everyday practical goals. For more than a generation,
the metaphorical language of this writing has been infiltrated and
coarsened by terms taken from business, technology, and advertising;
one often gets the sense that the spiritual life can be promoted by good
copy and achieved like technological progress by systematic progres
sive means. Louis Schneider and Sanford M. Dornbusch, in their il
luminating study of the themes of inspirational books, have spoken of
this as "spiritual technology/ 9 One success writer tells us that "God is a
twenty-four-hour station. All you need to do is to plug in/* Another that
""religious practice is an exact science that . . . f ollows spiritual laws
as truly as radio follows its laws/* Another that "high octane thinking
means Power and Performance" and that readers should "plug into the
Power House/* Another that "the body is ... a receiving set for the
catching of messages from the Broadcasting Station of God" and that
"the greatest of Engineers ... is your silent partner/* Another that
the railroad "saves money by having a Christian hand on the throttle."
Another exhorts readers to "open every pore of your being to the
health of God/* Another relates that a Sinclair gasoline ad provided
"the idea for a sermon about the unused power in our souls/* Bruce

9 Popular Religion: Inspirational Books in America (Chicago, 1958), pp. 164;
the quotations in this paragraph may be found on pp. i, 6, J 9 44, 5in., 58, 6in.,
63, 90, gin., 106, 107.

THE PRACTICAL CULTURE 268

Barton, in his ineffable book, The Man Nobody Knows, remarked that
Jesus "picked up twelve men from the bottom ranks o business and
forged them into an organization that conquered the world. 77 "Conduct
the affairs of your soul in a businesslike way/ 7 exhorts Emmet Fox.
Prayer is conceived as a usable instrument. "A man," says Glenn Clark,
"who learns and practices the laws of prayer correctly should be able
to play golf better, do business better, work better, love better, serve
better." "Learn to pray correctly, scientifically ,~ commands Norman
Vincent Peale. "Employ tested and proven methods. Avoid slipshod
praying."

One of the striking things that has occurred in the inspirational
literature is that the voluntaristic and subjective impulses which I
noted in commenting on the development of American Protestantism
seem to have come into complete possession and to have run wild.
There has been a progressive attenuation of the components of religion.
Protestantism at an early point got rid of the bulk of religious ritual,
and in the course of its development in the nineteenth and twentieth
centuries went very far to minimize doctrine. The inspirational cult
has completed this process, for it has largely eliminated doctrine at
least it has eliminated most doctrine that could be called Christian.
Nothing, then, is left but the subjective experience of the individual,
and even this is reduced in the main to an assertion of his will. What
the inspirational writers mean when they say you can accomplish
whatever you wish by taking thought is that you can will your goals
and mobilize God to help you release fabulous energies. Fabulous
indeed they are: "There is enough power in you? says Norman Vincent
Peale in an alarming passage, "to blow the city of New York to rubble.
That, and nothing less, is what advanced physics tells us." Faith can
release these forces, and then one can overcome any obstacle. Faith
is not a way of reconciling man to his fate: it "puts fight into a man so
that he develops a terrific resistance to defeat." *

Horatio W. Dresser, discussing one of the earlier manifestations of
inspirational thinking, the New Thought movement, once remarked
that "the tendency of the New Thought . . . has been to make light
of the intellect and of c the objective mind,* as if it were undesirable to
become intellectual and as if one could have whatever one wishes by
sending out a requisition into the great subconscious/ " 2 In the main,
however, the anti-intellectualism of the inspirational cults has been

1 A Guide to Confident Living, pp. 46, 55.

2 Handbook of the New Thought (New York, 1917), pp.

s,6g Self -Help and Spiritual Technology

indirect: they represent a withdrawal from reality, a repudiation of all
philosophies whose business is an engagement with real problems. At
the same rime., they manifest a paradoxical secularization. Although
professing Christians and ministers of the gospel are proud of having
written successful inspirational books, the books themselves are likely
to strike even secular intellectuals as blasphemous. The religious in
heritance of the West seems more in the custody of such intellectuals
than in the custody of these hearty advocates of the "utilization" of
religion.

The confusion between religion and self-advancement is perhaps
most aptly embodied in the title of Henry CL Link s remarkable book,
The Return to Religion, a best-seller from 1936 to 1941. I do not think
that this singular work could be regarded as entirely representative of
inspirational literature, but it deserves special notice here, for it is
possibly the most consummate manual of philistinism and conformity
ever written in America. Despite its title, it is in no sense a religious
or devotional work. Written by a consulting psychologist and personnel
adviser to large business corporations, who reports that he found his
way back to religion by way of science, this book view s religion as "an
aggressive mode of life by which the individual becomes the master of
his environment, not its complacent victim." 3 The author feels obliged
to wage a running battle against both individuality and mind in the
interests of the will to conformity.

The issue is not put quite this way. Link s basic polar terms are
introversion and extroversion (used in the popular, not the Jungian
sense). Introversion, which involves withdrawal, self-examination,
individuality, and reflection, is bad. It is in fact merely selfish. For the
Socratic maxim, "Know thyself/* Link would substitute the injunction,
"Behave yourself," because "a good personality or character is achieved
by practice, not by introspection." On the other hand, extroversion,
which involves sociability, amiability, and service to others, is unselfish
and good. Jesus was a great extrovert, One of the functions of religion

and it would appear that Link considers it the main function is to

discipline the personality by developing extroversion. Link goes to
church, he reports, "because I hate to go and because I know that it
will do me good." Church attendance builds better personalities. So do
bridge-playing and dancing and salesmanship they bring the individ-

3 Quotations in this and the following paragraphs are in The Return to Religion
( 1936; Pocket Book ed., 1943), PP- 9> ia> 14> 17, 19> 35, 44~5 ? 54-6*, 67, 69, 71,
73> 78-9, 115-16, 147-9, 157-

THE PRACTICAL CULTURE

ual into contact with others whom he must please. The important thing
for the individual is to get away from self -analysis and do work which
will give him power over things. This, in turn, will lead to power over
people, which will heighten self-confidence.

For all these purposes, the critical mind is a liability. In college it is
the intellectuals, the analytical students, who lose their religion; in
later life it is thoughtful men who become excessively withdrawn. In a
chapter entitled TFools of Reason,** Link argues that intellect and ra
tionality are commonly overvalued.

Reason is not an end in itself but a tool for the individual to use
in adjusting himself to the values and purposes of living -which are
beyond reason. Just as the teeth are intended to chew with, not to
chew themselves,, so the mind is intended to think with, not to
worry about. The mind is an instrument to live tvith, not to live for.

To believe and act on faith is central. Although religion has been called
the refuge of weak minds, the real weakness lies rather in the failure of
minds to recognize the weakness of all minds." "Agnosticism is an intel
lectual disease, and faith in fallacies is better than no faith at all . . .
foolish beliefs are better than no beliefs at all." Even palmistry leads to
holding other people s hands, phrenology to studying their heads and
"all such beliefs take the individual out of himself and propel him into
a world of greater interests/* Anyway, "the idolatry of reason and the
intellectual scorn of religion" has left men prey to quackery and pseudo-
science and political panaceas. In America there is an unfortunate na
tional tendency to introversion, which, among other things, causes
people to shirk their responsibility for the unemployed and to imagine
that the federal government should do something about them.

Mind is also a threat to marriage, because introversion undermines
marital happiness. Divorced people turn out to have more intellectual
interests than the happily married. A liking for philosophy, psychology,
radical politics, and for reading the New Republic are much less
auspicious for marital bliss than a liking for Y.M.C.A. work, Bible study,
and the American Magazine. In a chapter entitled "The Vice of Educa
tion/ Link attacks "the creation of a liberal mind" as "probably the
most damaging single aspect of education" a dogma of education as
mystical and irrational, he finds, as any dogma of the church ever was.
Such education produces "ruthless iconoclasm" and creates a culture
for its own sake and a demand for knowledge for its own sake. Liberal
ism releases a person from the traditions and restraints of the past and

Self -Help and Spiritual Technology

substitutes nothing for tibem. The liberally educated young are dis
posed to regard parents as old-fashioned, to spend freely, show intel
lectual scorn for the pieties of their elders, seek intellectual vocations
rather than the occupations of their fathers, and deprecate business as a
career. A better insight into the abundant life can be found in army
and navy barracks, where people face real values and are certain to be
come more extroverted.

t 272 ]
CHAPTER XI

Variations on a Theme

T

JLEO;

. HE REFRAIN about the prior virtues of practicality to which busi
nessmen give expression is a refrain they can easily pick up from the
folklore of American life, and it is not always certain who is echoing
whom. Expressions of the refrain have differed from time to time and
from class to class, but its melody has always been distinguishable, as
it resounds through a wide range of occupations and in the most dispa
rate political camps. The evidence is abundant, and it is nearly unani
mous in its testimony to a popular culture that has been proudly con
vinced of its ability to get along indeed, to get along better with
out the benefits of formal knowledge, even without applied science.
The possession and use of such knowledge was always considered to be
of doubtful value; and in any case it was regarded as the prerogative of
specialized segments of the population that were resented for their
privileges and refinements.

We can begin with the peculiar accents given to the common theme
by farmers, simply because the United States was for a long time pri
marily a nation of farmers. At the end of the eighteenth century, about
nine out of ten Americans made their living directly from farming; in
1820, seven out of ten; not until 1880 did persons otherwise employed
equal farmers in numbers. In many ways the American farmer was
primarily a businessman. He may often have thought of farming as a
way of life, but this way of life soon became astonishingly businesslike
in its aspirations if not always in its mode of conductfjThe vast extent
of the American land, the mobile and non-traditional character of
American rural life, and the Protestant dynamism of American society
made for a commercially minded and speculative style in farming. The

273 Variations on a Theme

fanner was constantly tempted to engross more land than he could
economically cultivate, to hold it speculatively for a rise in values, to go
in for extensive and careless rather than intensive and careful cultiva
tion., to concentrate on raising a single big commercial crop, to mine
and deplete the soil, then to sell out and move. As early as 1813 John
Taylor of Caroline, in his Arator, found that Virginia was "nearly
ruined** for lack of careful cultivation,, and begged his countrymen:
"Forbear, oh forbear matricide, not for futurity, not for God s sake, but
for your own sake. 7 * La the 1830*3 Tocqueville concluded: "The Ameri
cans carry their businesslike qualities into agriculture, and their trad
ing passions are displayed in that as in their other pursuits.* *

Farmers had their own notion of what was practical, most simply
expressed in their attitude toward scientific improvement in agriculture
and toward agricultural education. Among a busy and hard-working
farm community that was seldom very affluent one could hardly expect
to find patrons of art and learning; but a receptive state of mind at least
toward applied science would have been immensely useful to the
farmers themselves. Even this was considered useless. There was, of
course, a deviant minority; but the preponderant attitude of dirt farm
ers toward improvement in their own industry was a crass, self-defeat
ing kind of pragmatism.

Like almost everything else in American life, the farm industry -was
large and heterogeneous. But there was one basic class division within
it that coincided with a cleavage in philosophical outlook and that
was the early nineteenth-century division between the dirt farmers and
a small stratum of gentlemen farmers. The gentlemen farmers were
large farmers, professional men, college or university scientists, busi
nessmen, or agricultural editors who commonly had incomes from
sources outside farming, who -were interested in agricultural experi
mentation, read and on occasion wrote books on the subject, hoped to
use scientific knowledge to improve agriculture, formed agricultural
societies, and joined or led movements to uplift agricultural education.
Distinguished names, recognizable for their achievements in other
areas, can be found among the gentleman farmers. They include such
men as the Connecticut preacher Jared Eliot, who wrote his classic
Essay on Field Husbandry in New England between 1748 and 1759,
and Eliot*s sometime correspondent, Benjamin Franklin, who main-

a john Taylor: Arator (Georgetown, 1813), pp. 767; Alexis de Tocqueville:
Democracy in America ( New York, 1945 ), Vol. II, p. 157; I have tried to assess the
commercial element in American agriculture in The Age of Reform (New York,
1955), chapters.

THE PRACTICAL CXTLTURE 274

tained a farm near Burlington, New Jersey, from which he hoped to
reap a profit but which he also used as a terrain on which to pursue
his scientific curiosity. Washington, Jefferson, Madison, and John
Taylor of Caroline, who belonged to the tradition of the enlightened
agriculturists, attempted to import into the practices of Virginia agri
culture the benefits of the revolution in eighteenth-century English
farming. They were followed by Edmund Ruffin, famous for his ex
periments with calcareous fertilizers, editor of the Farmers Register,
and later a militant sectionalist who fired the first shot at Fort Sumter.
Outside Virginia, the most active and impressive center of agitation for
agricultural improvement was not in a notable farming community but
at Yale College, where an understanding of the needs of agriculture
-was Tfnlced to the study of advanced chemistry. There, academic
scientists, beginning with the younger Benjamin Silliman, concerned
themselves with soil chemistry, crops, and scientific agriculture; Silli
man was followed by John P. Norton, John Addison Porter, and Samuel
W. Johnson. Among other things, these men attempted to popularize
the work of Justus Liebig in soil chemistry. Jonathan B. Turner of
Illinois, also educated at Yale, was one of the leading agitators for im
proved agricultural education; the inspiration of the Morrill Act has
been rather uncertainly credited to him. In New York the self-educated
farm editor Jesse Buel preached consistently for higher standards in
agriculture. In Pennsylvania Evan Pugh, a brilliant student of plant
growth and plant chemistry, became president of the Agricultural
College of Pennsylvania and helped promote the Morrill Act before his
premature death at thirty-six.

In that they combined scientific curiosity with agricultural practice
and a sense of civic responsibility with the pursuit of agricultural prof
its, such men provided an example of the admirable union of the intel
lectual and the practical. And they were not altogether without a
public. Their work reached a fairly broad class of gentleman farmers
men who were the backbone of agricultural societies and farm fairs,
readers of farm periodicals, proponents of agricultural schools and col
leges. A good practical book on agriculture, if successful, might sell
from ten to twenty thousand copies. Perhaps one farmer in ten sub
scribed to an agricultural Journal, and on the eve of the Civil War there
were more than fifty such journals, in various stages of prosperity or
poverty. 2

2 On the number of farm journals, see Albert L. Demaree: The American
Agricultural Press, 18191860 (New York, 1941), pp. 17 xg; on books and journals.

2,75 Variations on a Theme

But the advocates of agricultural improvement and the gentlemen
farmers were resented by dirt farmers. This resentment had in it an
element of class feeling: the gentlemen organized and promoted the
agricultural activities, and overshadowed the small farmers. At the
county fairs, they were likely to turn up with the prize specimens,
produced experimentally and without regard to cost; the common
farmer could not compete with these. 3 Their preachments also ran up
against a state of mind that was conservative, unreceptive, suspicious
of innovation, and often superstitious. The American farmer, untradi-
tional though he was about land speculation, about moving from place
to place, or about adopting new machinery, was ultra-conservative
about agricultural education or the application of science to farming.
As a consequence, the professional agriculturists and farm editors felt
that they were working in a skeptical, if not hostile, environment. "If
the farmers in your neighborhood," wrote Benjamin Franklin to Jared
Eliot, "are as unwilling to leave the beaten road of their ancestors as
they are near me, it will be difficult to persuade them to attempt any
improvement/ George Washington wrote apologetically to Arthur
Young that American farmers were more eager to take advantage
of cheap land than to expend dear labor, and that, as a consequence,
"much ground has been scratched over and none cultivated or im
proved as it ought to have been." Edmund Ruffin, who conducted his
early experiments under the eyes of mocking neighbors, concluded:
"Most farmers are determined not to understand anything, however
simple it may be, which relates to chemistry." "Our farmers," com
plained Jesse Buel, "seem generally indifferent or spiritless in regard to
the general improvement of our agriculture, either because they mis
take their duty and true interest or that, under the influence of a
strange fatuity, they fear they shall sink as others rise." The farmers,
said the editor of the American Farmer in 1831, "will neither take an
agricultural paper, read it when given them, nor believe in its contents
if by chance they hear it read." Twenty years later the eminent British
agricultural scientist, James F. W. Johnston, reported after a lecture
tour in America that the farmers were "averse to change, and more
averse still to the opinion that they are not already wise enough for all

Paul W. Gates: The Farmer s Age: Agriculture, 1815-1860 (New York, 1960), pp.

3-43? -

3 *On this aspect of the fairs, see Gates: op. cit., pp. 31^-15; cf. W. C. Neely:
The Agricultural Fair (New York, 1935), PP- 3O, 35, 4^-5, 7* l8 3J an<* P. W. Bid-
well and J. I. Falconer: History of Agriculture in the Northern United States
(Washington, 1925), pp. 186-93.

THE PRACTICAL CTTLTURE 276

they Lave to do/* In New York they were opposed to an agricultural
college, he found, "on the ground that the knowledge to be given in
the school is not required, and that its application to the soil would be
of doubtful benefit." 4

In fact, the farmer had a good deal to learn from the agricultural
reformers. Even the open-minded farmer was likely to be ignorant of
the principles of plant and animal breeding, of plant nutrition, of
sound tillage, of soil chemistry. Many farmers were sunk in the super
stitions of moon-farming sowing, reaping, and mowing in accordance
with the phases of the moon. Their practices were wasteful and deple
tive. 5 For the educative efforts of the reformers they had the disdain
of the "practical" man for the theorist expressed in the contemptuous
term book farming. "The men who are farmers by book are no farmers
for me," said one. "Give me the man who prefers his hands to books
... let those who follow husbandry for amusement try experiments.
. . . Let learned men attend to cases, genders, moods and tenses: you
and I will see to our flocks, dairies, fields and fences." 6 Against this
overwhelming prejudice the reformers and farm editors manfully
waged a difficult struggle. Jesse Buel complained that in every other
sphere in war and navigation, law and medicine Americans had
thought of formal education as a meaningful aid, indeed as a neces
sity: 7

And yet, in Agriculture, by which, under the blessing of Provi
dence, we virtually "live, and move, and have our being," and
which truly embraces a wider range of useful science than either
law, medicine, war, or navigation, we have no schools, we give no
instruction, we bestow no governmental patronage. Scientific
knowledge is deemed indispensable in many minor employments
of life; but in this great business, in which its influence would be
most potent and useful, we consider it, judging from our practice,

4 Carl Van Doren: Benjamin Franklin (New York, 1938), p. 178; Bidwell and
Falconer: op. cit., p. 119; Avery O. Craven: Edmund Ruffin, Southerner (New-
York, 1932), p. 58; Harry J. Carman, ed.: Jesse Buel: Agricultural Reformer
(New York, 1947), p. 10; Demaree: op. cit., p. 38; James F. W. Johnston: Notes on
North America: Agricultural, Economic, and Social ( Edinburgh, 1851), Vol. II,
p. 281.

5 Demaree: op. cit., pp. 4-6, 10, 48-9. On wasteful cultivation, see Gates: op.
cit., who makes the necessary regional and ethnic qualifications.

6 Richard Bardolph: Agricultural Literature and the Early Illinois Farmer
(Urbana, Illinois, 1948), p. 14; cf . pp. 13, 103.

7 Carman: op. cit., pp. 249-50. See the instructive essay in which these remarks
appeared, pp. 234-54, and BueFs remarks "On the Necessity and Means of Improv
ing Our Husbandry/* pp. 82,1.

2,77 Variations on a Theme

of less consequence than the fictions of the novelist. We regard
mind as the efficient power in most other pursuits; while we forget
that in Agriculture it is the Archimedean lever, which, though it
does not move, tends to fill a world with plenty, with moral
health, and human happiness. Can it excite surprise that, under
these circumstances of gross neglect, Agriculture should have be
come among us, in popular estimation, a clownish and ignoble
employment?

But "the great bar to agricultural improvement," Buel thought, "is
the degrading idea, which too many entertain, that everything de
nominated science is either useless in husbandry or beyond the reach of
the farmer." 8 The continuous exhortations of the farm editors, their
constant efforts to overcome the feeling against book farming, seem to
bear out his -words. Not all the farm journals were impeccable; some
of them had their own quackeries to peddle. But, in any case, they
found it constantly necessary to explain apologetically that they were
not advocating anything ultra-theoretical, that most of their copy was
written by practicing farmers. When Laebig s great work on soil
chemistry was brought out in an American edition in 1841 this, it must
be said, found a receptive and eager public among agricultural reform
ers and even among a few dirt farmers his discoveries were de
scribed in the Southern Planter as "new fine-spun theories." 9

Mr. Justus Liebig is no doubt a very clever gentleman and a
most profound chemist, but in our opinion he knows about as
much of agriculture as the horse that ploughs the ground, and
there is not an old man that stands between the stilts of a plough in
Virginia that cannot tell him of facts totally at variance with his
finest spun theories.

In the light of what has been said about opposition to science and book
farming, it will hardly be surprising that there was great reluctance

8 Carman: op. cit., p. 53. For a temperate answer by another editor to the ultra-
practical bias of the working farmer, see: "An Apology for Book Farmers/ **
Farmer s Register y Vol. II. (Tune, 1834 )> pp. 16-19; cf. "Book Farming," Farmer s
Register, Vol. I (May, 1834), P- 743-

9 Demaree: op. cit., p. 67. On the dirt farmers and the farm press, see pp. 113
16; cf. Sidney L. Jackson: Americas Struggle -for Free Schools (Washington, 1940 ),
pp. 11114, 142-4. The farmer s favorite secular reading seems to have been his
almanac, and the old farmer s almanac at times catered to his anti-intellectual
sentiments with racy anecdotes or poems about the impracticality and foolishness
>f the learned. Jackson: op. cit., pp. 1:213.

THE PRACTICAL CULTUHE 278

among farmers to accept the idea that education ( other than a highly
practical on-the-fann training) could do much for their children. Such
hopes as the farmers may have had for agricultural education seems to
have been overweighed by their fear that more schools would only
mean more taxes. An advocate of agricultural schools in the American
Farmer in 1827 found that farmers themselves had offered "the warm
est opposition to them." * A correspondent writing to the New England
Farmer in 1852, himself an opponent of a proposed Massachusetts
agricultural college, thought that nine tenths of the practical farmers
of the state agreed with him. In any case, he set forth articulately
enough the arguments of the opposition to the school: farmers would
not make use of it; they would consider it "a grand and expensive ex
periment" that did not promise a corresponding return; it would only
give "a few men a rich and lucrative office" that they had no experience
to qualify for; the advocates of the scheme hoped to give the sons of
rich men and those in genteel pursuits a knowledge of farming. As to
that, "the art cannot be taught to any advantage, except by practice" *
This was only a facet of a more general rural reluctance to support
educational enterprises. Sidney L. Jackson, in his analysis of attitudes
toward the common-school movement, reports that the farmer "was
more a hindrance than a help in the struggle for better schools." 3 The
various experiments in agricultural colleges that were made in the
United States before the passage of the Morrill Act in 1862 were
chiefly the work of small, dedicated groups of agricultural reformers
which no doubt accounts in some part for the fact that in a nation
overwhelmingly agricultural and desperately in need of agricultural
skills 4 so little was done until the federal government intervened.

1 Gates: op. cit., pp. 358-60.

2 "Agricultural Colleges," reprinted from the New England Farmer, n.s. Vol. IV
(June, 1852), pp. 267-8, in Demaree; op. cit., pp. 2502.

3 Jackson: op. cit., p. 172; cf. pp, 113, 127, passim.

4 Professor John P. Norton of Yale wrote in 1852: "If any six states of the Union
were within the present year to make provision for the establishment of state
agricultural schools, or colleges, within tneir respective borders were to endow
them largely in every department, to furnish them with libraries, implements,
museums, apparatus, buildings, and lands, they could not find on this continent the
proper corps of professors and teachers to fill them." He doubted, in fact, that a
single institution in New York could find a faculty of "thoroughly competent men."
Demaree: op. cit., p. 245.

For a brief history of efforts to improve education in farming, see A. C. True:
A History of Agricultural Education in the United States, 1785-2025 (Washington,
1929). In 1851 Edward Hitchcock made a survey of agricultural education in
Europe for the Massachusetts legislature; in it the work of the American states ap
peared to great disadvantage when compared with the continental countries,
especially Germany and France.

Variations on a Theme

The passage in 1862 of the Merrill Act owed little to popular enthusi
asm; once again, it was the achievement of a group of determined
lobbyists. Earle D. Ross, in his excellent study of the land-grant move
ment, observes that "there was no indication of spontaneous public
interest." The Morrill Act was hardly noticed, amid the war news, by
the general press; the agricultural papers themselves failed to show
much enthusiasm, and some did not even take cognizance of its exist
ence. 5

The law itself, at first, was hardly more than a well-intentioned
promise; and the reformers were to find out in the next thirty years
how difficult it was to execute meaningfully a reform so far in advance
of public opinion. Senator Merrill s notions were sensible enough. The
American soil, he recognized, was badly and wastefully cultivated;
other countries were doing far more than the United States in the way
of agricultural and mechanical education; experiments and surveys
were needed; the farmer had to have instruction in new scientific find
ings; the creation of sound agricultural and mechanical schools, sup
ported by the revenues from the public lands, would be in line with
earlier American precedents for aid to education; it would not interfere
with the autonomy of the states or with the kind of education then be
ing offered by the classical colleges. For a time, MorrilTs proposals ran
afoul of sectional politics, and the idea of agricultural land-grant col
leges was vetoed by Buchanan in 1859. But Lincoln signed a similar
bill three years later. Congress seems to have been more persuaded
of the need for reform than the majority of farmers. 6 Unfortunately,
however, as Ross remarks, the measure was never discussed on its
educational merits. Objections to it were based largely on its alleged
unconstitutionality and on trivia with the consequence that the law,
as it emerged from Congress, was inadequate to realize the intentions
of its framers.

Once established, the land-grant colleges were beset by all kinds of
difficulties, not least among them the jealousy of the existing colleges
and the American preference for educational diffusion and dispersion

5 Earle D. Ross: Democracy s College (Ames, Iowa, 1942), p. 66.

6 Rather exceptional in the Congressional debates over the land-grant college
principles were such echoes of the feeling ahout book-farming as were uttered by
Senator Rice of Minnesota: "If you wish to establish agricultural colleges, give to
each man a college of his own in the shape of one hundred and sixty acres of land
. . . but do not give lands to the states to enable them to educate the sons of the
wealthy at the expense of the public. We -want no fancy farmers; we want no
fancy mechanics. . . /* I. L. Kandel: Federal Aid for Vocational Education (New
York, 1917), p. 10.

THE PRACTICAL GXTLTTTRE 280

as against concentration of effort. It was inordinately difficult to recruit
competent staffs. Old-line educators, reared on the traditions of the
classical colleges, often could not really accept the legitimacy of agri
cultural and mechanical education, and on occasion they sabotaged the
new colleges from within. On the opposite side, there was the tradi
tional small-minded opposition from farmers and folk leaders, who
persisted in believing that science had nothing ^practical" to offer
farmers. As Ross points out, "the farmers themselves were the hardest
to convince of the need and possibility of occupational training."
When they did not resist the idea of such education, they resisted
proposals that it have any university connections or any relation to ex
perimental science. Separate farm colleges, severely utilitarian in
purpose, would do. The Wisconsin Grange argued that each profession
should be taught by its practitioners. "Ecclesiastics should teach ec
clesiastics, lawyers teach lawyers, mechanics teach mechanics, and
farmers teach farmers." Some governors wanted to get as far away as
possible from the tradition of liberal education represented by the clas
sical colleges. The governor of Ohio wanted the instruction to be "plain
and practical, not theoretically and artistically scientific in character";
the governor of Texas imagined that an agricultural college was "for
the purpose of training and educating farm laborers**; the governor of
Indiana thought that any kind of higher education would be a deterrent
to honest labor. 7

More decisive than any argument was the fact that not many farmers
sent their sons; and when they did, the sons took advantage of their
educational opportunities to get out of farming usually to go into
engineering. For years the agricultural colleges had relatively few stu
dents, and among these the students of "mechanic arts" i.e., engineer
ing outnumbered the students of agriculture from year to year by
ratios of two, three, four, or five to one. An improvement in the situa
tion of agricultural science came with the Hatch Act of 1887, which
created the system of federal experiment stations working in close co
operation with the agricultural colleges and also made available ex
panding research facilities. By the iSgo s the colleges of agriculture

7 Boss: op. cit., chapters 5 ,6, 7, and pp. 66, 7^, 80, 87, 89-90, 96-7, 108-9. One
paper called the agricultural colleges "asylums for classical idiots and political
professors/* and another suggested that the necessary task was "to clean out the
smug DJD/s and the pimply-faced Professors/ and put in their places men who
have a lively sense of the lacks in learning among men and women who have to
grapple daily with the world s work in this busy age." Ibid., pp. 119-20. Cf.
James B. Angell: Reminiscences (New York, 1912), p. 123: "The farmers . . .
were the hardest class to convince that we could be of any help to them/

Variations on a Theme

finally had something of considerable value to offer in the way of
scientific training.

Another flaw in the land-grant system was that it had been built from
the top down. No provision had been made by Congress to develop a
system of rural secondary schools good enough to equip graduates for
admission to agricultural colleges. This defect was remedied in 1917
in the Smith-Hughes Act, which made federal subsidies available to
secondary vocational education in agriculture. The return of agricul
tural prosperity after the long deflationary period from 1873 to 1897
also brought a turn in the fortunes of agricultural education. Better
profits encouraged farmers to think about business management, ani
mal breeding, soil science, and agricultural economics. The advance of
mechanization made it easier for them to spare their sons from the
farms. The number of agricultural students rose consistently and
rapidly after 1905, and on the eve of the First World War it almost
equalled the number of engineers. As M. L. Wilson, Undersecretary of
Agriculture under Franklin D. Roosevelt, recalled, the contempt for
book farming, almost universal in his Iowa community down to the
turn of the century, was overcome only during the years of his youth: s

Shortly after the twentieth century began, science began to work
a revolution among the mass of farmers. When I went to Ames to
study agriculture in 1902, I was not the first boy in my Iowa
neighborhood to go to college, but I was the first boy from that
neighborhood to go to an agricultural college. Ten or fifteen years
later it was becoming an accepted thing for all who could af
ford it.

I. L. Kandel, surveying the subject in 19 17, remarked with ample justi
fication that the land-grant colleges, "intended by Senator Morrill and
his supporters for the function primarily of scientific preparation for
agricultural pursuits, are only just now, more than fifty years after their
foundation, beginning to fulfil the function for which they -were
established." 9

The reader, who -will be unlikely to think of the agricultural and
mechanical colleges as pre-eminently centers of intellectualism, may
question what was accomplished and what is being asserted here. I
have no intention of misstating the character of the agricultural colleges

8 Milburn L. Wilson, in O. E. Baker, R. Borsodi, and M. Lu Wilson: Agricul
ture in Modern Life ( New York, 1939) , pp. 2,2.34.

9 Kandel: op. cit. ? p. 103; cf. p. 106. On the number of students in agricultural
and mechanical courses in these colleges, see p. 102..

THE PRACTICAL CULTURE

in this respect; they were meant only to bring vocational education and
applied science into some kind of fruitful union, which I take to be a
useful objective. The essential point here is that this much-needed
fusion was achieved only after a century of agitation by agricultural
reformers in the teeth of a widespread and extremely obstinate con
viction among working farmers that theory has nothing to offer to
practice.

* 3 *

Farming could be plausibly portrayed as a "natural" way of living,
whose practitioners might lose far more than they would gain by at
tending to sophisticated critics and adopting bookish or scientific ideas.
It was quite otherwise with the industrial working class, whose way of
life was considered unnatural, and who needed to be brought to some
level of self -awareness and organization before they could give expres
sion to any attitude toward their fate. From the outset, the rela
tionship of intellectual criticism and the labor movement took on a
more complex character than it had among farmers. In his brilliant in
quiry into The Psychology of Socialism, Henri de Man remarked: "The
labor movement, uninfluenced by the intelligentsia and its concerns
[Intelligenzlermotives], would be nothing more than a representation
of interests intended to turn the proletariat into a new bourgeoisie/* x
There is in this observation a certain ironic appropriateness for the
American labor movement, which more than any other has aimed at
making the proletariat into a new bourgeoisie. In the United States, as
elsewhere, the labor movement was in a very real sense the creation of
intellectuals. But it was a child that turned upon its own father in order
to forge its distinctive character. It was not possible to develop labor
leadership of the type that could finally succeed in creating permanent
organizations in America until a curious dialectic had been gone
through: first, the influence of intellectuals and their systematic cri
tique of capitalism created an awareness of the necessity for and the
possibilities of a labor movement; but then, in successive stages, this
influence had to be thrown off before the labor movement could shed
distractions and excrescences, devote itself to organizing job-conscious
trade unions, and establish itself on a durable and successful footing^
\ Historically, the American labor movement did not begin with that
narrow concentration on the job, the wage bargain, and the strike which

1 Henri de Man: Zur Psychologie des gozialismus (Jena, 1926), p, 307.

283 Variations on a Theme

eventually became the essence of its character. It was always heavily
infiltrated with bourgeois leadership, affected by the aims of reform
theorists, and colored by the interest of its members either in achieving
a solid place in bourgeois society or in entirely reforming that society.
Its early history consists of association with one sweeping reform
panacea or another land reform, anti-monopoly, Greenbackism, pro
ducers co-operatives, Marxism, Henry George s single tax. Not until
more than three quarters of a century of such experimentation had left
the American labor movement with next to nothing to show in the way
of solid permanent organization did it develop any effectiveness, and
this only when it was taken over by pragmatic leaders of the order of
Samuel Gompers and Adolph Strasser, who brought it to a focus on the
job and the wage bargain and on the organization of skilled trades
strong enough to hope to monopolize the labor market in their own
crafts. y

Both Adolph Strasser, who had been a socialist, and Samuel Gom
pers, the guiding spirit of the A. F. of L. during its first generation of
existence, undoubtedly owed a good deal to their own youthful dia
logues with the socialists. Gompers paid what was perhaps a reluctant
tribute to fhfo early intellectual training in his autobiography, when he
pointed out:

Many of those who helped to lay the foundations of the trade
union movement were men who had been through the experience
of Socialism and found their way to sounder policies. . . . They
were always men of vision. . . . Experiences in Socialism served a
constructive purpose if the individual was able to develop be
yond the formulas of Socialism, for such carried to their practical
duties a quickened insight and an understanding that tangible ob
jectives are merely instrumentalities for reaching a higher spiritual
goal.

However, whereas socialism may have taught such men the pos
sibilities of a labor movement, the labor movement itself, once estab
lished, taught them the impossibility of socialism in America. From his
earliest days in the labor movement, Gompers had to battle with "fad
dists, reformers, and sensation-loving spirits" his terms for the ideolo
gues who hovered around the labor movement; and there were times
when these ideologues were among his most formidable enemies. It
-was the socialists who were instrumental in defeating him for the presi
dency of the A. F. of L. in 1894, the only year when he was not re-

THE PRACTICAL CULTURE 284

elected. He was convinced that leadership could be entrusted "only to
those into whose hearts and minds had been woven the experiences of
earning their bread by daily labor." "I saw the danger of entangling al
liances with intellectuals who did not understand that to experiment
with the labor movement was to experiment with human life." 2

Intellectuals were estranged from labor leaders like Gompers be
cause their expectations from the labor movement were altogether dif
ferent. The intellectuals tended to look upon the labor movement as a
means to a larger end to socialism or some other kind of social recon
struction. They came from outside the labor movement, and were rarely
recruited from the working class itself. As a rule, they disdained the
middle-class respectability to which most labor leaders, and in fact most
rank and file skilled workers, aspired. A bread-and-butter organization
like the A. F. of L. never appealed to their idealism, and they persist
ently looked down upon its leadership. The labor leaders themselves
may best be understood, I believe, as a group of self-made men, in
this respect not profoundly different from hundreds of such men in
industrial corporations. As Strasser said, in a classic encounter: "We are
all practical men." 3 They came from the ranks of the working class,
for the most part, and never quite ceased to hope that labor and its
leaders would achieve a respectability comparable to that enjoyed by
businessmen. They had been exposed to anti-capitalist and anti-
monopoly thought, but unlike the intellectuals they were unfamiliar
with the thoroughgoing indictments of bourgeois civilization that per
vaded avant-garde thought in politics and esthetics. They were good
patriots, good family men, in time good Republicans or Democrats. 4
Their early contacts with intellectuals or what they took to be intel
lectuals were of the sort to arouse their suspicion. At first there were
the battles with the socialist doctrinaires within the labor movement

2 Samuel Gompers: Seventy Years of Life and Labor (192,5; ed. New York,
1943)5 Vol. I, pp. 55, 57, 97-8, 180, 382. This distrust of intellectuals in the labor
movement was shared by one of the early labor intellectuals, John R. Commons,
who felt that the labor movement attracted a type of intellectual who made a poor
leader. See John R. Commons: Myself (New York, 1934), pp. 869; see also his
Industrial Goodwill (New York, 1919), pp. 176-9.

3 Senate Committee on Education and Labor, Relations between Labor and
Capital, Vol. I (Washington, 1885), p. 460. Cf. the equally classic remark of
Gompers in 1896: "The trade unions are the business organizations of the wage
earners/" Report of the Sixteenth Annual Convention of the American Federation
of:Labor, 1896, p. 12,.

^ My remarks here have been shaped in part by Selig Perlman*s A Theory of the
La$or Movement (1928; ed. New York, 1949), pp. viii-ix, 154, 176, 182, and
chapter 5, passim. See C. Wright Mills s provocative remarks about labor leaders
as self-made men, in The New Men of Power ( New York, 1948), chapter 5.

2,3$ Variations on a Theme

itself. The labor leaders constantly smarted from the criticism of aca
demic economists, 5 who were for a long time an almost united phalanx
against labor ~tihe professoriate/ 7 as Gompers labeled them, "the open
and covert enemies of the workers," and "faddists., theorists and ef
feminate men." Finally., around the turn of the century, the movement
for "scientific management" was regarded by labor as a grave menace;
Gompers saw its leaders as "academic observers" and "intellectuals"
who merely wanted to get the most out of the energies of workers be
fore sending them to the junkpile. These were not experiences to en
courage confidence. 6 The labor movement was in fact struggling to

5 Although the American labor movement was always favorable to the develop
ment of the common-school system, it was chronically suspicious of the higher cul
ture and of institutions of higher learning. From time to time labor journals made
acid comments about the gifts of millionaires to museums, libraries, and universities,
pointing out that these had been wrung out of the wages of the workers "millions
taken from the earnings of the toilers, given to institutions which the workmen and
their children can never enter and enjoy/ A particular hostility was expressed to
ward universities and colleges, as places where poor men s sons could never go and
where "millions are annually expended in teaching the sons of the wealthy some
new brutality in football/* Quite understandably the labor editors feared that the
universities would be bound by their endowments to teach that the status quo was
beyond criticism, and that colleges and universities would become "incubators * for
scabs and strikebreakers, ,What could be expected to be taught at a university en
dowed by Rockefeller? Would it be the rights of man or the superiority of the
wealthy? One writer even suggested in 1905 that the new "theoretical college
men* who were replacing the old practical men in the leadership of industry
would be more remote from the workers because they had not risen from the ranks.
College men "have nothing in common -with plain workingmen upon whom they
look down with disdain as did the patricians of old upon the plebians, or the slave
owners of the South upon the Negroes/* In 1914 the American Federationist sug
gested that private endowments were unsuited to the pursuit of the truth, and were
"a menace to free institutions." If they could not be better devoted to the truth,
"then they must give way to state institutions supported by public funds." American
Federationist, Vol. XXI (February, 1914), pp. 1.2,0 i. See Rail Road Conductor
(November, 1895), p. 613; Typographical Journal (June 15, 1896), p. 484; Boiler
makers* Journal (March, 1899), p. 71; Railway Conductor (August, 1901), pp.
639-40; American Federationist Vol. X (October, 1903), p. 1033; The Electrical
Worker (May, 1905), p. 40; Railroad Trainmen s Journal* Vol. XXTV (1907),
pp. 2,645; (April, 1907), p. 368; Locomotive Firemen s Magazine, Vol. XLIV
(January, 1908), pp. 867.

No doubt the growing social sympathies of American academics did something to
overcome this feeling. The American Federationist thought in 1913 that colleges
and universities were in fact ""helping to establish a more sympathetic, democratic
understanding of social and industrial problems." Vol. XX (February, 1913), p.
12,9. Gompers found himself much sought after by the universities as a speaker, and
spent considerable time cultivating good relations there. Seventy Years of Life and
Labor, Vol. I, pp. 437 ff .

6 See Gompers: Organized Labor: Its Struggles > Its Enemies and Fool Friends
(Washington, 1901), pp. 3, 4; Gompers: "Machinery to Perfect the Living Ma
chine," Federationist, Vol. XVIII (February, 1911), pp. 116-17; cf. Milton J.
Nadworny: Scientific Management and the Unions (Cambridge, Mass., 1955),
especially chapter 4.

THE PRACTICAL CULTURE 286

establish itself in an unfriendly environment, and before 1900 the of
ficial intellectuals, on balance, contributed to that unfriendliness. Those
who were not unfriendly were in any case regarded as unwise and
unwelcome allies. It was not until the advent of the Progressive move
ment that middle-class intellectuals in any great number were notably
friendly to the cause of labor, and not until the New Deal era that a
strong, if not altogether durable, alliance was forged. 7

Over the years since the time of Gompers, the growth, success, and
stabilization of the trade unions has made it increasingly necessary for
these big bureaucratic hierarchies to hire experts for legal, actuarial,
and economic advice, for research and journalism, for publicity and
lobbying, for their own large educational divisions. In this -way, the
men who lead the country s eighteen million organized -workers have
become the employers of substantial staffs of intellectuals. But intel
lectuals in union headquarters have not found a more comfortable
home than those in other areas of organized society they have, in
fact, a relationship to the union leaders not altogether unlike that of
business intellectuals to corporation heads.

Three pressures, in the main, seem to alienate the intellectual from
the union milieu. The first, operative only for some, is a passion for
reform, an ideological commitment that may have made the intellec
tual want to work for a union in the first place. Sooner or later he will
come to see that he has not made the labor movement radical but
rather that he himself has been absorbed into the machinery that but
tresses the power and prestige of the leaders. Inevitably, the idealism
of the union expert is blunted, as he finds himself caught up in a going
concern that is ready to use him but unwilling to be bent by his will.
(Union experts who come to the job with missionary enthusiasm tend
to be paid somewhat less than more self -centered careerists.) The sec
ond source of alienation is his professional feeling for research, his dis
interested desire for the truth, "which on occasion runs up against the
necessities of the union as a militant organization or the personal im
peratives of a leader. "They re sloppy in their use of data/* complains
one expert about his union associates. 8

7 On the recent partial dissolution of this alliance, see James R. Schlesinger:
"Organized Labor and the Intellectuals/* Virginia Quarterly Review, Vol. XXXVI
( Winter, 1960 ) , pp. 36-45.

8 For my argument here, as well as the quotations from labor leaders and labor
experts, I am indebted to Harold L. Wilensky: Intellectuals in Labor Unions
(Glencoe, Illinois, 1956), passim, and especially pp. 55, 57, 68, 88-90, 93, 106,
116-20, 1351, 260-5, 266n., 2,67, 273-6. On the limitations of the power of the labor
intellectual, see also C. Wright Mills: op. cit., pp. 281-7.

287 Variations on a Theme

They don t give a damn. They re philosophical relativists with
no real belief in truth or in scientific objectivity; or at least they
think the search for truth is too difficult, so they abandon it and
excuse themselves from it by saying, "Who s interested in the
truth, anyway management?" Basically, it s because they have
a Marxist or a social reform attitude. Everything becomes a matter
of partisan advantage. . . . All they want to do is build up the
prejudices of the leader. ... I sometimes wish I d gone into uni
versity teaching,

From time to time, experts seek unwelcome truths or become the
medium through which union leaders are brought face to face -with
some unwelcome reality, say in the legal or economic world. In this
capacity they are resented, much as they are needed. The labor editor
may aspire to run an intelligent organ of critical opinion; his union
leader may be far more concerned that the union s journal take the
right side in factional disputes. The union educational director may
wish to offer something akin to a liberal education for workers; the
leader may seek only simple indoctrination and ideological safety.

Finally, there is a type of alienation which is simply personal, which
arises from the education and in some cases the personal culture of the
expert. He is out of place, he is not the right kind of man, he would
not be sought after as a companion if his services weren t needed.
Mumbled complaints pursue him in the union offices, just as though he
were actually on the assembly line or for that matter at a Rotary
Club meeting: "Prima donna types . . . you can t work together with
them. . . . They aren t liked. . . . They re not the same Joes. They
don t like the same kind of women. . . , lj

The attitude of labor leaders toward labor intellectuals displays an
ambivalence somewhat similar to that found in the business community
and in society at large. Harold Wilensky has found in his study of labor
experts that the labor leader is sometimes intimidated or overawed
by the specialized knowledge of the intellectual, and often admires it.
But he reassures himself with disdainful remarks about the impractical-
ity of the expert, if not about his oddities. One high-ranking union of
ficer who boasted: "I was educated in the school of hard knocks," voiced
these mixed feelings when he said with equal pride: "I ve told my son
to take up labor law in college!" In some areas the non-intellectual is
afflicted by a nagging envy of the expert s job: "Why, that S.OJB., he s
got the soft job. ... I knock myself out taking crap from the rank and

THE PRACTICAL CULTURE 288

file, I gotta go out to local meetings night after night while he sits be
hind a desk and writes up all that stuff." (Like the businessman, the
union leader loudly praises practical experience first-hand acquaint
ance with the workbench or with union organizing activity. "You can t
learn it from books. There s no substitute for experience/* He was in the
struggle from the beginning; the expert is an outsider and a Johnny-
come-lately who cannot understand the labor struggle or the psychol
ogy of the worker because he has not dealt with it at first hand. "Your
whole thinking on this matter ... is fantastic. You are a legal mind;
you are from Harvard, or Yale, or some other place like the rest of the
guys up there, and you don t understand the thinking of the workers."
Under the circumstances, it is not surprising that the experts at times
give way to a feeling of self-distrust and adopt a quietistic pose or at
tempt to camouflage themselves. The atmosphere in which they work
may be in many ways stimulating and benign, but, according to a
student of experts in the labor bureaucracy, one of its components is a
"pervasive anti-intellectualism." 9

4

It is hardly surprising that the organized labor movement in America,
directed as it is toward "bourgeois" goals, has provided intellectuals
with an environment that is not thoroughly congenial. It is somewhat
more surprising to find similar problems arising in the non-Communist
left, and especially in the Socialist Party, whose debt to intellectuals
was heavy indeed. It would be altogether misleading to suggest that
the Socialist Party in its day was an anti-intellectual force, or that it
was inhospitable to intellectuals. From 1900 to 1914, the American So
cialist Party attracted a large number of intellectuals whose support
was invaluable and whose writings brought it cachet and greatly wid
ened its influence. Among them were not only muckrakers like Upton
Sinclair and John^Spargo^put the authors of stimulating critical books
about socialism and various aspects of American life which are still
worth reading men like[ Louis B. Boudiij/W. J. Ghent, Robert Hunter,
Algie M. Simons, and William English Walling^ Unlike the later Com
munist Party, the Socialist Party maintained an intellectual atmosphere
that was far from monolithic, and produced a theoretical literature not
entirely cramped by Marxian scholasticism. American socialism, plural
istic in its social recruitment, was still free and even adventurous in
9 Wilensky: op. cit., pp. 269, 276.

2,Sg Variations on a Theme

thought, and some of Its supporters brought to it a light-spirited Bohe
mian touch. "The Masses" one of its periodicals advertised, "has a
Sense of Humor, , . . Enjoy the Revolution/

But in some quarters even the Socialist Party suffered from the cult
of proletarianism, In the party s frequent factional fights, intellectual
spokesmen -were often branded as middle-class academics and were
compared invidiously with the true proletarians who were the bulwark
of the movement. (When revolutionary fervor was in question, the
intellectuals were found in the left-wing faction much more often than
in the right.) Inevitably, the attempt of socialist intellectuals, often
from solid middle-class and sometimes from wealthy backgrounds, 1 to
declass themselves spiritually and to accommodate to the proletarian
ideals of Marxism led to a certain self -depreciation and self -alienation.}
Hence, the anti-intellectual wing of the party was not without its
intellectual spokesmen. 2 One of them, W. J. Ghent, thought that the
Masses, with its latitudrn arian enthusiasms, was far too frivolous to
contribute seriously to the fundamental business of converting workers
to socialism:

It has found no trouble in mixing Socialism, Anarchism, Com
munism, Sinn Feinism, Cubism, sexism, direct action, and sabotage
into a more or less harmonious mess. It is peculiarly the product of
the restless metropolitan coteries who devote themselves to the
cult of Something Else; who are ever seeking the bubble Novelty
even at the door of Bedlam.

Another intellectual, Robert Rives La Monte, felt that although the
party needed brains in abundance, brains should not be identified
with the possession of "a conventional bourgeois education," and con
cluded that the existence of "a reasonable degree of suspicion of

1 Finley Peter Dunne was much amused by the interest of a few of the rich in
socialism. "Mrs. Vanderhankerbilk," said Mr. Dooley , "Give a musical soree f r th
ladies iv th* Female Billyonaires Arbeiter Verein. . . . Th* meetin* was addhressed
be th* well-known Socialist leader, J. Clarence Lurnley, heir to th* Lumley millyons.
This well-known prolytariat said he had become a Socialist through studyin* his
father. He cud not believe that a system was right which allowed such a man to ac-
cumylate three hundherd millyon dollars. . . . Th ladies prisint cud appreciate how
foolish th captains iv industhree are, because they were marrid to thim an* knew
what they looked like in th mornin*. . . . Th* meetin* thin adjourned afther
passin* a resolution callin on th* husband iv th* hostess to go an* jump in th* river."
Finley Peter Dunne: Mr. Dooley: Now and Forever (Stanford, California, 1954),
pp. 252-3.

2 Charles Dobbs, writing on "Brains** in the International Socialist Review, Vol.
VIII (March, 1908), p. 533, noticed that "it is the intellectuals who are attacking
the intellectuals* and the leaders* who are delivering the mightiest blows at leader
ship/ "

THE PRACTICAL CULTURE 290

Intellectuals and Parlor Socialists" was a "most reassuring sign that the
proletariat are approaching maturity as a class. 7 3 With this a right-wing
party wheelhorse like George H. Goebel could agree. When it came
to a choice between the intellectual, preacher, or professor and the
working man, "that man who is fresh from the ranks of the working
class and who in his every day life is in actual contact with the work
and the struggle/* Goebel said, he was always with the representative
of the working class. 4

The most extreme anti-intellectual position in the party a veritable
proletarian mucker pose was taken not by the right-wingers nor by
the self-alienated intellectuals but by Western party members affected
by the LW.W. spirit. The Oregon wing of the party, one of its strong
Western segments, was a good example of this spirit. The story is told
that at the party s 1912 convention in Indianapolis the Oregon delegates
refused to have dinner in a restaurant that had tablecloths. Thomas
Sladden, their state secretary., once removed the cuspidors from the
Oregon headquarters because he felt that hardboiled tobacco-chewing
proletarians would have no use for such genteel devices. It was Slad
den, too, who in the International Socialist Review wrote an implacable
challenge to the intellectuals. As he saw it, the movement belonged to
the worker and to no one else. The Socialist Party and the labor unions
"must either give way to, or take up arms against the man that thinks
through his stomach/ " Sladden delineated the true socialist proletarian
in these terms: 5

He has a language of his own, different from the accepted
language of civilization, he is uncultured and uncouth in ap
pearance, he has a code of morals and ethics as yet unrecognized

3 David Shannon: The Socialist Party of America (New York, 1955), p. 57;
Robert R. La Monte: "Efficient Brains versus Bastard Culture/* International
Socialist Review, Vol. VIII (April, 1908), pp. 634, 636. On intellectuals in the
socialist movement, see Shannon: op. cit., pp. 8, 12, 19, 53-8, 2812; Daniel Bell:
"The Background and Development of Marxian Socialism in the United States/ in
Donald Drew Egbert and Stow Persons, eds.: Socialism and American Life (Prince
ton, 195^)> Vol. I, pp. 294-8; Ira Kapnis: The American Socialist Movement, 1897
1Q12 (New York, 1952), pp. 307-11, and Bell s review of this work in The New
Leader, December 7, 1953.

4 Bell: "Background and Development/* p. 294. Cf. the attack by the right-
wing leader, Max Hayes, on parlor socialists and theorists in the party convention of
1912. Socialist Party of America, Convention Proceedings, 1912 (Chicago, 1912),
p. 124.

5 "The Revolutionist,** International Socialist Review? Vol. IX ( December,
1908), pp. 429-30. On Sladden, see Shannon: op. cit., p. 40; for an answer to
Sladden by a socialist who considered that the proletariat embraced the intellec
tuals, see Carl D. Thompson: "Who Constitute the Proletariat?" International
Socialist Review, Vol. IX (February, 1909), pp. 60312.

2.g i Variations on a Theme

by society, he has a religion unpreached in orthodox and un
orthodox churches, a religion of hate. . . . He has an intelligence
which passes the understanding o the intellectuals who are born,
reared and living outside his sphere.

Like the instinct of the brute in the forest, his vision is clear and
he is ever on the alert, his hearing is keen, his nature suspicious,
his spirit is unconquerable. . . . With one swoop he will tear
away your puny intellectuality, your bogus respectability and as
master of all he surveys he \vlll determine what is right and what
wrong.

This is the proletarian. . . . He has little education, no man
ners, and little care for what people think of him. His school has
been the hard school of human experience.

Here the cult of proletarianism seems blended with a variety of
primitivism of the sort another Westerner, Jack London, tried unsuc
cessfully to graft onto the socialist movement. /More typical of the
feelings of non-intellectuals in the Socialist Party was the moderate
position of its leader, Eugene V. Debs. Observing that there were
many socialists "who sneer at a man of intellect as if he were an inter
loper and out of place among Socialists," Debs remonstrated that
intellectual ought not be a term of reproach. The movement needed
brains; the party should seek to attract them. What -was important to
Debs -was that normally "officials and representatives, and candidates
for public office, should be chosen from the ranks of the workers. The
intellectuals in office should be the exceptions, as they are in the rank
and file." Organizations of workers should not be run by intellectuals,
just as organizations of intellectuals should not be run by workers. Debs
considered that workers had ample ability to fill the official positions
themselves. His fear of intellectuals in official posts was consistent
with his fear of stratification and bureaucracy within the socialist
movement. Like a good Jacksonian, he acknowledged his belief in
"rotation in office." "I confess," he said, "to a prejudice against official
ism and a dread of bureaucracy." 6

5

Whereas the Socialist Party had admitted some measure of diversity,
the Communist Party was monolithic: it wanted no writers who would

6 "Sound Socialist Tactics," International Socialist Review, Vol. XII ( February,
1912-), pp. 483-4. Three years after these remarks Robert Michels published his
Political Parties, an analysis of oligarchical tendencies in European left-wing parties.

THE PRACTICAL CULTURE

not subject themselves to its characteristic rigid discipline. Moreover,
the intellectuals who were drawn to the Socialist Party during its most
vital period, before the First World War, were mainly thinkers in
dependently acquainted with Marxism, who took over leadership in
the party ranks as theorists. The Communist Party attracted a far
higher proportion of creative writers and literary critics, who knew lit
tle or nothing of Marxism or of the formal social disciplines and were
willing, at least for a time, to submit themselves to the tutelage and
discipline of the party apparatus. Within the Communist Party, as its
intellectual influence widened during the 1930*3, certain anti-intellec
tual tendencies, notably the cult of proletarianism, which had been
hardly more than visible in the Socialist Party, became actually domi
nant. The change in the balance of moral power was dramatic: in So
cialist Party circles one senses the discomfort of true proletarians at the
thought that the intellectuals among them wielded so much influence;
in Communist Party circles one is aware of the anguish of party or fel
low-traveling intellectuals because they are not, by occupation or
birth, workers themselves.

Earlier American radicals, like Edward Bellamy and Henry Dem-
arest Lloyd, had sometimes taken a slightly condescending and cus
todial attitude toward the working class; but in the 1930*3 a number
of American writers gave way to the fatally maudlin notion that the
sufferings and the "historic mission * of the working class endow it with
an immense inherent moral superiority over middle-class intellectuals.
To atone for their tainted class origins and their middle-class character,
many such intellectuals felt they must immolate themselves on the altar
of the working class by service of one kind or another to the party /The
Communist Party itself, keenly aware of the usefulness of its intellectual
converts and at the same time of the danger that might be posed to its
discipline by an influx of independent minds, adopted the strategy of
exploiting the guilt and self -hatred of intellectuals as a means of keep
ing them in line^Oh one hand, it provided them with a creed and gave
them a small but growing audience; on the other, it attempted to play
upon their psychological vulnerability to prevent them from straying.
This policy had mixed results; the most distinguished writers, whose
prestige the party particularly coveted Dreiser, Sinclair, Steinbeck,
Hemingway, MacLeish, Dos Passes proved to be the most refractory,
the most unwilling to follow tamely the decrees of obscure party hack^ r
Lesser writers, less self-confident and more dependent upon the public
party could give them, were more submissive, though not always

293 Variations on a Theme

submissive enough for the party s purposes. Paul Rosenfeld had writers
like these in mind when he complained in 1933 that they had re
nounced their responsibilities as artists and were competing "as to
which could most quickly reconcile himself with the philistinism which
the Communist party shares with every other party. * 7

If the true spirit of Bolshevik discipline was to be instilled in radical
American writers, the Bohemianism that had flowered in the days of
the Masses had to be destroyed. Writers must be made to feel that
Bohemianism and all forms of merely personal revolt were unserious,
trivial, neurotic. John Reed, once a Bohemian himself, led the way.
"This class struggle," he said, "plays hell with your poetry"; and if it did,
no doubt poetry would have to go. "Bolshevism," he declared on an
other occasion, "is not for the intellectuals; it is for the people." "You
fellows/ he remarked to a Menshevik theorist, "are not living beings;
at best you are bookworms always thinking about what Marx said or
meant to say. What we want is a revolution, and we are going to make
it not with books, but with rifles." Reed did not live long enough to
demonstrate how far he would have carried the implications of this
creed. After his death, the role of goad to the intellectuals was assumed
by Michael Gold, for many years the party s critical hatchetman.
Gold had succeeded more fully than most left intellectuals in de-
classing and deintellectualizing himself. 8 Floyd Dell, a party sym
pathizer but an incurable Bohemian, perceived that Gold, as a literary
man, "is for some obscure reason ashamed of not being a workingman.
. . . And so he is in awe of the workingman when he meets him, and
says extravagant things in praise of him." To a generation of writers
younger than Dell, the reasons for this shame and awe were not so
obscure.

r The Communist view of the intellectual s function brought forth
certain ironic variations on the themes of practicality, masculinity, and
primitivism that run through the national code at large; and it is amus
ing to see how, with a few changes in terms, the party code is similar

7 Quoted in Daniel Aaron: Writers on the Left (New York, 1961), pp. 2545. I
ha^e drawn heavily for my argument and illustrations on this thorough and percep
tive study, and the quotations and incidents in the following paragraphs are from
pp. 2,5, 41, 65, 93-4, 132*1., 162, 1634, 168, 209, 21012, 216, 227, 2402, 254,
308, 3378, 346, 409, 410, 417, 425. The attitude of the Communist Party toward
intellectuals was far more rigid before 1935, when it adopted the "united front "
line, than afterwards.

8 Gold, who was as impeccably anti-Harvard as any McCarthyite of the 195* S >
was impelled to deny his brief attendance there. " Certain enemies have spread the
slander that I once attended Harvard College. This is a lie. I worked on a garbage
dump in Boston, city of Harvard. But that is all."

THE PRACTICAL CULTURE 294

to certain attitudes expressed by businessmen. The important task
was a ruggedly practical one to make a revolution. Everything else
was subordinate; art and intellect were useless if they could not be
put to work. Writers who failed to serve the revolution were accused,
in the party s characteristic imagery, of being literary prostitutes to the
bourgeoisie: they were "the most ancient and venerable of prostitutes,
and (in the language of a young -writer of impeccable proletarian
origins) "literary vermin . . . who play the scented whore, and for
thirty pieces of silver, will do the hootchi-kootchi dance, or wriggle their
abdomens in imitation of legendary oriental ladies/

The making of revolutions was a task that called not only for greater
moral purity but for a kind of heavy masculinity that too many writers
lacked. Again, the practical and masculine demands of politics were
contrasted with the futility of estheticism. One writer was taken aback
when a party leader referred to his poetry and short stories as his
"hobby" for after-hours activity a revealing illustration of the party s
conception of letters as fundamentally unserious. Worst of all was the
failure of masculinity in writers who would not deal with the hard
realities of the class struggle. Party intellectuals differed over the mat
ter, but the most rugged of them were unsparing in their denuncia
tion of what they called, in their crusade against the literary Humanists,
"fairy literature." Michael Gold once told Sinclair Lewis that writers of
this sort were nursing a "mad jealousy" because they had been "de
prived of masculine experiences/ In the course of a famous literary
vendetta against Thornton Wilder, Gold accused the novelist of
propagating a "pastel, pastiche, dilettante religion, without the true
neurotic blood and fire, a daydream of homosexual figures in graceful
gowns moving archaically among the lilies/

In their most extreme moments, those who tried to formulate a Com
munist canon for literature called for working-class writers who would
supply the "Proletarian Realism" ( Gold s phrase) that bourgeois writers
allegedly failed to produce. Let the Neto Masses., the party organ, be
written and read by lumberjacks, hoboes, miners, clerks, sectionhands,
machinists, harvesthands, waiters the people who should count more
to us than paid scribblers," urged one of these working-class writers. "It
might be crude stuff but we re just about done primping before a
mirror and powdering our shiny noses. Who are we afraid of? Of the
critics? Afraid that they will say the Neiv Masses prints terribly Tin-
grammatical stuff? Hell, brother, the newsstands abound with neat
packages of grammatical offal.T Such utterances tended to drive writers

Variations on a Theme

away from the movement. They were alienated by what one of them
called "the affectation of idealized proletarianism, the monotonous
strumming on the hard-boiled string, the hostility to ideas on other
levels than one, the contempt for modulated writing and criticism., the
evasion of discussion." !

These differences were indicative of a major problem faced by the
party in dealing with writers and other intellectuals: the conflict be
tween its urgent desire to use them and its inability to sustain a tone
that would hold them. Even Michael Gold, whose polemical extrava
gances did as much as anything to keep otherwise sympathetic intel
lectuals at arm s length from the party, at times grew restless with the
attitude of party leaders toward writers. He once admitted that intel
lectuals were too commonly made to feel that they were outsiders:
"The word intellectual became a synonym for the word Tbastard/
and in the American Communist movement there is some of this feel
ing." Members of the party were not above exploiting this feeling
about intellectuals as a weapon in internal struggles: during a factional
fight in the twenties, Joseph Freeman has recalled, the Foster group
attacked the Lovestone group in a word-of -mouth campaign on the
ground, among others, that they were college men, bourgeois, and
Jews. The feeling had astonishing consequences. Malcolm Cowley,
writing during the Moscow trials from his post as a fellow-traveling
editor of a major metropolitan non-party weekly, said of Trotsky in all
seriousness: "I have never liked the big-city intellectuals of his type,
with their reduction of every human question to a bald syllogism in
which they are always right at every point. . . ."

For a time, if only a brief time in the life of most radical writers,
the canons of the party were accepted, and with them the corollary
that the intellectuals, and the institutions that had reared them, were
no good. "I think we are all of us a pretty milky lot," John Dos Passos
wrote during the First World War, "with our tea-table convictions and
our radicalism that keeps so consistently within the bounds of de
corum. . . . I d like to annihilate these stupid colleges of ours, and all
the nice young men therein, instillers of stodginess every form of
bastard culture, middle class snobism." Genevieve Taggard, deferring
to the urgent "practical" task of revolution, felt that writers were use
less:

Practical men run revolutions, and there s nothing more irri
tating than a person with a long vague look in his eye to have

THE PRACTICAL CULTURE 296

around, when you re trying to bang an army into shape, or put
over a N.EJP. If I were in charge of a revolution, I d get rid of
every single artist immediately; and trust to luck that the fecun
dity of the earth would produce another crop when I had got some
of the hard work done. Being an artist, I have the sense that a
small child has when its mother is in the middle of house-work.
I don t intend to get in the way, and I hope that there ll be an
unmolested spot for me when things have quieted down.

Many writers had entered the movement in the belief that the revolt
against the bourgeois world would be, for them at least, a revolt against
its disrespect for culture. But whichever world one might choose,
there was always a prior practical job to be done bourgeois indus
trialization or a New Economic Policy, the quest for individual success
or the need to "bang" an army into shape.

PART

Education in a
Democracy

[ 299 1

CHAPTER XII

The School and the Teacher

A

ANYONE who speaks of anti-intellectualism as a quality in Amer
ican life must reckon with one of the signal facts of our national ex
perience our persistent, intense, and sometimes touching faith in the
efficacy of popular education. Few observers, past or present, have
doubted the pervasiveness or sincerity of this faith. Henry Steele
Commager, assessing the primary characteristics of the nineteenth-
century American, remarks that "education was his religion" though
he is quick to add that Americans expected of education what
they expected of religion, that it "be practical and pay dividends." *
The Americans were the first other people in modern history to follow
the Prussian example in establishing free common-school systems.
Among their earliest statutes were land ordinances setting aside a
portion of the public domain to support school systems. Their rapidly
proliferating schoolhouses and libraries testified to their concern for
the diffusion of knowledge, and their lyceums and Chautauquas
showed that this concern, far from ending -with the school years, ex
tended to the education of adults.

From the beginning, American statesmen had insisted upon the
necessity of education to a republic. George Washington, in his Fare
well Address, urged the people to promote "institutions for the general
diffusion of knowledge." To the degree that the form of government
gave force to public opinion, Washington argued, "it is essential that

1 Henry Steele Commager: The American Mind (New Haven, 1950), p. 10;
cf . pp. 37-8. Rush Welter: Popular Education and Democratic Thought in America
(New York, 1962), is an informative study of what Americans expected from
education.

EDUCATION IN A DEMOCRACY 300

public opinion should be enlightened." The aging Jefferson warned in
1816: "If a nation expects to be ignorant and free in a state of civiliza
tion, it expects what never was and never will be." The young Lincoln,
making his first appeal to a constituency, told the voters of Sangamon
County in 1832 that education was "the most important subject which
we as a people can be engaged in." 2 The image of the youthful Lincoln
lying before a log fire and reading a book by its flickering light has been
fixed as an ideal in the minds of millions of school children (who are
not, I believe, pressed to consider what he may have been reading ) .
In popular rhetoric it was always good practice for an editor or orator
who wanted to take off on an extended flight of idealism to pay
tribute to education. "If the time shall ever come/ wrote a small-town
Midwestern editor in

when this mighty fabric shall totter; when the beacon of joy that
now rises in pillar of fire . . . shall wax dim, the cause will be
found in the ignorance of the people. If our union is still to con
tinue . . . ; if your fields are to be untrod by the hirelings of
despotism; if long days of blessedness are to attend our country
in her career of glory; if you \vould have the sun continue to shed
his unclouded rays upon the face of freemen, then EDUCATE
ALL THE CHILDREN OF THE LAND. This alone startles the
tyrant in his dreams of power, and rouses the slumbering energies
of an oppressed people. It was intelligence that reared up the
majestic columns of national glory; and this and sound morality
alone can prevent their crumbling to ashes.

But if we turn from the rhetoric of the past to the realities of the
present, we are most struck by the volume of criticism suggesting that
something very important has been missing from the American passion
for education. A host of educational problems has arisen from indiffer
ence underpaid teachers, overcrowded classrooms, double-schedule
schools, broken-down school buildings, inadequate facilities and a num
ber of other failings that come from something else the cult of
athleticism, marching bands, high-school drum majorettes, ethnic

2 Washington, in Richardson, ed. : Messages and Papers of the Presidents., Vol. I,
p. 2,2,0; Jefferson: Writings, P. L. Ford, ed., Vol. X (New York, 1899), p. 4; Lin
coln; Collected Works, Roy P. Easier, ed., Vol. I (New Brunswick, New Jersey,

^953 )>P- 8.

3 R. Carlyle Buley: The Old Northwest Pioneer Period, 1.82.5-1.840 (Indi
anapolis, 1950), Vol. II, p. 416.

301 The School and the Teacher

ghetto schools, de-intellectualized curricula, the failure to educate in
serious subjects, the neglect of academically gifted children. At times
the schools of the country seem to be dominated by athletics, com
mercialism, and the standards of the mass media, and these extend
upwards to a system of higher education whose worst failings were
underlined by the bold president of the University of Oklahoma who
hoped to develop a university of which the football team could be
proud. 4 Certainly some ultimate educational values seem forever to be
eluding the Americans. At great effort and expense they send an
extraordinary proportion of their young to colleges and universities;
but their young, when they get there, do not seem to care even to
read. 5

That something has always been seriously missing in our educational
performance, despite the high promise of our rhetoric, has been evi
dent to the educators who have taken our hopes most seriously. The his
tory of our educational writing poses a formidable challenge to those
modern educational critics who yield too readily to nostalgia for good
old days that apparently were never too good. The educational writing
that has been left to us by men whose names command our respect is
to a remarkable degree a literature of acid criticism and bitter com
plaint. Americans would create a common-school system, but would
balk at giving it adequate support. They would stand close to the
vanguard among the countries of the world in the attempt to diffuse
knowledge among the people, and then engage drifters and misfits as
teachers and offer them the wages of draymen.

The history of American educational reformers often seems to be the
history of men fighting against an uncongenial environment. The edu
cational jeremiad is as much a feature of our literature as the jeremiad
in the Puritan sermons. That this literature should have been one of
complaint is not in itself surprising, for complaint is the burden of
anyone who aims at improvement; but there is a constant undercurrent
of something close to despair. Moreover, one finds it not only on the

4 An impressive brief critique of these failings may be found in Robert M. Hutch-
ins: Some Observations on American Education ( Cambridge, 1956).

5 On American reading, in and out of college, see Lester Asheim: **A Survey of
Recent Research," in Jacob M. Price, ed.: Reading for Life (Ann Arbor, Michigan,
1959); Gordon Dupee: "Can Johnny s Parents Read?" Saturday Review, June 2,,
1956.

EDUCATION IN A DEMOCRACY 302

educational frontiers of the West, or in darkest Mississippi, but in
Massachusetts, the state that stood first in the development of the
common-school system and has never lost her place among the leading
states in education. Yet, in this state, the educational reformer James
Gordon Carter warned in 1826 that if the legislature did not change its
policies the common schools would be extinct within twenty years. 6
The criticisms made by Horace Mann about one of the nation s
best school systems during his years as secretary of the Massachusetts
Board of Education after 1837 are illuminating. Schoolhouses, he said,
were too small, and ill-situated; school committees, to save money, had
neglected to insure uniformity in the textbooks, with the consequence
that a single class might be using as many as eight or ten manuals in a
given subject; school committees were neither well paid nor accorded
social recognition; one portion of the community was so apathetic
about education that it would do nothing for the school system, but the
wealthier portion had given up on the common schools and were
sending their children to private institutions; many towns neglected
to comply with the state s school requirements; there was an "extensive
want of competent teachers for the Common Schools," but the existing
teachers, however ill-equipped, were "as good as public opinion has
demanded"; there was "an obvious want of intelligence in the reading-
classes"; "the schools have retrograded within the last generation or
half generation in regard to orthography"; "more than eleven-twelfths
of all the children in the reading-classes in our schools do not under
stand the meaning of the words they read." He was afraid that "ne
glectful school committees, incompetent teachers, and an indifferent
public, may go on degrading each other" until the whole idea of free
schools would be abandoned, 7

6 Essays upon Popular Education ( Boston, 1826 ) , p. 41.

7 Horace Mann: Lectures and Annual Reports on Education, Vol. I (Cambridge,
1867 ), pp. 396, 403-4, 4o8, 413, 422, 506-7, 532, 539. Of considerable interest is
Manns report of 1843, in which he made extensive comparisons with Prussian
education. There, he remarked, "the teacher s profession holds such a high rank in
public estimation, that none who have failed in other employments or departments
of business are encouraged to look upon school-keeping as an ultimate resource. *
Life and Works, Vol. Ill (Boston, 1891), pp. 266 ff. and especially pp. 346-8.
Francis Bowen, Harvard s professor of moral philosophy, concurred with Mann s
views; the New England school system, he said, looking backward in 1857, "had
degenerated into routine, it was starved by parsimony. Any hovel would answer for
a school-house, any primer would do for a text-book, any farmer s apprentice was
competent to *teach school/" American Journal of Education, Vol. IV (Septem
ber, 1857), p. 14.

303 The School and the Teacher

The complaints continued, and the plaintive note spread from New
England to the country at large. In 1870, when the country was on the
eve of a great forward surge in secondary education, William Franklin
PhelpSj then head of a normal school in Winona, Minnesota, and later a
president of the National Education Association, declared: 8

They [the elementary schools] are mainly in the hands of
ignorant, unskilled teachers. The children are fed upon the mere
husks of knowledge. They leave school for the broad theater of
life without discipline; without mental power or moral stamina.
. . . Poor schools and poor teachers are in a majority throughout
the country. Multitudes of the schools are so poor that it would
be as well for the country if they were closed. . . . They afford
the sad spectacle of ignorance engaged in the stupendous fraud of
self-perpetuation at the public expense. . . . Hundreds of our
American schools are little less than undisciplined juvenile mobs.

In 1892 Joseph M. Rice toured the country to examine its school sys
tems and reported the same depressing picture in city after city, with
only a few welcome exceptions: education was a creature of ward
politics; ignorant politicians hired ignorant teachers; teaching was an
uninspired thing of repetitive drill. 9 Ten ye ars later, when the
Progressive movement was barely under way, the New York Sun had a
different kind of complaint: x

When we were boys, boys had to do a little work in school.
They were not coaxed; they were hammered. Spelling, writing,
and arithmetic were not electives, and you had to learn. In these
more fortunate times, elementary education has become in many
places a vaudeville show. The child must be kept amused, and
learns what he pleases. Many sage teachers scorn the old-fash
ioned rudiments, and it seems to be regarded as between a mis
fortune and a crime for a child to learn to read.

8 NEA Proceedings, 1870, pp. 13, 17. For a series o complaints similar to these,
and ranging from 1865 to 1915, see Edgar B. Wesley: N.E.A.: The First Hundred
Years (New York, i957) pp* 138-43-

9 The Public School System of the United States ( New York, 1893 ) .

1 Marian G, Valentine: "William H. Maxwell and Progressive Education,"
School and Society, LXXV (June 7, 1952), p. 354. Complaints of this order began
to emerge at this time as a response to the new education. See the remarks of Lys
D Aimee as quoted in R. Freeman Butts and Lawrence Cremin: A History of
Education in American Culture (New York, 1953), PP- 385-6.

EDUCATION IK A DEMOCRACY 304

A generation later, after the nation had developed its great mass
system of secondary education, and education itself had become highly
professionalized, Thomas H. Briggs of Teachers College, delivering his
Inglis Lecture at Harvard, assessed the nation s "great investment"
in secondary education and concluded that it had gone sadly awry.
"There has been no respectable achievement/* he observed, "even in
the subjects offered in the secondary school curricula." Performance
in mathematics, he thought, was of the sort which, applied in business,
would lead to bankruptcy or the penitentiary. Only half the students
could find the area of a circle, when given the value of pi and all
necessary data. Students of foreign languages acquired neither the
ability to read nor the ability to communicate. Only half the students
who had completed a year s study of high-school French could translate
Je nai parle a personne; and only one fifth of the pupils who elected
French took more than two years of the language. In Latin, the results
were as bad. A year s study of ancient history yielded students who
could not tell who Solon was; and after a year of American history,
students were unable to define the Monroe Doctrine even though
both subjects were stressed in these courses. Courses in English failed
to produce in the majority any "permanent taste for -what is called
standard literature" and brought results in written English that were
"in a large fraction of the cases shocking in their evidence of in
adequate achievement/ 7 2

Today we live in the age of systematic surveys., and the evidences
of our various educational failures have accumulated to the point at
which documentation is futile. 3 The widest range of difference exists
with regard to the practical meaning of this evidence. Many profes
sional educationists welcome it as further proof of their contention that
the traditional course of studies is unsuited to vast numbers of children
in a system of mass education. Critics of the educational system argue
that these findings simply show the need to return to higher standards
and to improve our educational morale. Concerning the central fact
of educational failure there is relatively slight dispute; and the failure
itself underlines one of the paradoxes of American life: that in a society

2 Thomas H. Briggs : The Great Investment: Secondary Education in a Democ
racy (Cambridge, Mass., 1930), pp. 124-8.

3 My favorite among such surveys is one Los Angeles made of 30,000 of its
school children in 1951. Among other things, it showed that almost one of every
seven eighth graders could not find the Atlantic Ocean on a map, and that ap
proximately the same proportion of eleventh graders (aged sixteen to eighteen),
could not calculate 50 per cent of 36. Time, December 10, 1951, pp. 934*

305 The School and the Teacher

so passionately intent upon education, tihe yield of our educational
system has been such a constant disappointment.

. 3

We may., of course, nourish the suspicion that there is something mis
leading about these findings and criticisms. Is not the history of con
stant complaint by school authorities and educational reformers simply
a sign of healthy self-criticism? Were not many of these complaints
followed by reforms? If the American public educational system is
measured not by some abstract standards of perfection but by the goals
for which it was originally established, must it not be considered a
success? On this count there is undoubtedly much to be said. The
American system of common schools was meant to take a vast, hetero
geneous, and mobile population, recruited from manifold sources and
busy with manifold tasks, and forge it into a nation, make it literate,
and give it at least the minimal civic competence necessary to the
operation of republican institutions. This much it did; and if in the
greater part of the nineteenth century the United States did not
astound the world with its achievements in high culture, its schools
at least helped to create a common level of opinion and capacity that
was repeatedly noticed with admiration by foreign observers.

Here no doubt the American educational creed itself needs further
scrutiny. The belief in mass education was not founded primarily
upon a passion for the development of mind, or upon pride in learning
and culture for their own sakes, but rather upon the supposed political
and economic benefits of education. No doubt leading scholars and
educational reformers like Horace Mann did care for the intrinsic
values of mind. But in trying to persuade influential men or the
general public of the importance of education, they were careful in
the main to point out the possible contributions of education to public
order, political democracy, or economic improvement. They under
stood that the most irresistible way to "sell" education was to stress its
role not in achieving a high culture but in forging an acceptable form
of democratic society. They adopted and fixed upon the American
mind the idea that under popular government popular education is an
absolute necessity. To the rich, who were often wary of its cost, they
presented popular education as the only alternative to public disorder,
to an unskilled and ignorant labor force, to mis government, crime, and
radicalism. To the people of middle and lower classes they presented

EDUCATION IN A DEMOCRACY 306

it as the foundation o popular power, the door to opportunity, the
great equalizer in the race for success. 4

As to the vast, inarticulate body of the American public, it is im
possible to be certain exactly what it expected from the school system,
other than an opportunity for the advancement of its children. That the
development of intellectual power was not a central concern seems
clear, but there is also some evidence that the anti-intellectualism
I have already characterized in religion, politics, and business found
its way into school practice. There seems to have been a prevailing
concern that children should not form too high an estimate of the
uses of mind. Ruth Miller Elson s recent researches in the content of
nineteenth-century schoolbooks indicate that the compilers of school
readers tried to inculcate in the children attitudes toward intellect, art,
and learning which, we have already seen, were widely prevalent in
adult society. 5 The old school readers contained a considerable pro
portion of good literature, but even at their best the selections were
hardly chosen because they would inculcate the values of creative
intellect.

As Mrs. Elson remarks, the primary intellectual value these books
embodied was utility. As an early reader said: "We are all scholars of
useful knowledge/ Jedidiah Morse s famous geography boasted:
"While many other nations are wasting the brilliant efforts of genius in
monuments of ingenious folly, to perpetuate their pride, the Ameri
cans, according to the true spirit of republicanism, are employed al
most entirely in works of public and private utility." Authors of school-
books were proud of the democratic diffusion of knowledge in America
and were quite content to pay the price of not having so many ad
vanced or profound scholars. "There are none of those splendid estab
lishments such as Oxford and Cambridge in which immense salaries
maintain the professors of literature in monastic idleness. . . . The
People of this country have not yet been inclined to make much

4 The arguments used by educational reformers are discussed by Lawrence
Cremin: The American Common School (New York, 1951); Merle Curti: The
Social Ideas of American Educators (New York, 1935); and Sidney L. Jackson:
America s Struggle for Free Schools (Washington, 1940). One of the most illumi
nating documents of American social history is Robert Carlton [Baynard Rush
Hall]: The Neu> Purchase, or Seven and a Half Years in the Far West (1843;
Indiana Centennial ed., Princeton, 1916); it is full of information about folk atti
tudes toward education in the old Midwest.

5 I am much enlightened by Mrs. Elson s article, "American Schoolbooks and
Culture* in the Nineteenth Century/ Mississippi Valley Historical Review, Vol.
XL VI (December, 1959), pp. 411-34; the quotations in the following paragraphs
are taken from this essay, pp. 413, 414, 417, 419, 4^1, 42,2, 425, 434.

307 The School and the Teacher

literary display they have rather aimed at works of general utility." A
similar pride was expressed that American colleges and universities,
unlike those of Europe, were not devoted simply to the acquisition of
knowledge but to the moral cultivation of their students. The Ameri
can college was complacently portrayed as a place designed to form
character and inculcate sound principle rather than to lead to the
pursuit of truth.

The common school was thought to have been designed for a similar
purpose. "Little children/* said Alice Gary in a selection used in a third
reader of 1882, "you must seek rather to be good than wise.** "Man s
intellect," said another writer, "is not man s sole nor best adorning/*
The virtues of the heart were consistently exalted over those of the
head, and this preference found its way into the hero literature of the
school readers. European heroes might be haughty aristocrats, soldiers
destructive on the battlefield, or "great scholars who were pensioned
flatterers of power, and poets, who profaned the high gift of genius to
pamper the vices of a corrupted court/* But American heroes were
notable as simple, sincere men of high character. Washington, a cen
tral figure in this literature, was portrayed in some of the books as an
example both of the self-made man and of the practical man with little
use for the intellectual life. "He was more solid than brilliant, and had
more judgment than genius. He had great dread of public life, cared
little for books, and possessed no library/ said a history book of the
i88o s and 1890*3. Even Franklin was not depicted as one of the intel
lectual leaders of the eighteenth century, or as a distinguished scientist
at home in the capitals of the world and among its aristocracies, but
rather as an exemplar of the self-made man and the author of catch
penny maxims about thrift and industry.

The highbrow sources anthologized in the readers consisted of ma
terials that would confirm these sentiments. Anti-intellectual quotations
from Wordsworth were prominent in the first half of the century, and
from Emerson in the second half. A fifth reader of 1884 quoted Emer
son s Goodbye:

I laugh at the lore and the pride of man,
At the sophists* schools, and the learned clan;
For what are they all in their high conceit,
When man in the bush with God may meet.

There was a certain bias, too, against the idea of intellectual pleas
ure; the standard injunctions against novel-reading were repeated; and

EDUCATION IN A DEMOCRACY 308

the notion was on occasion set forth that reading for pleasure is an
altogether bad business: ~A book which is torn and mutilated is abused,
but one which is merely read for enjoyment is misused." Mrs. Elson
concludes, from an intensive analysis of these readers, that "anti-
intellectualism is not only not new in American civilization, but that
it is thoroughly imbedded in the school books that have been read by
generations of pupils since the beginning of the republic. *

This downgrading of intellect was not compensated by any high
regard for the arts. Music and the fine arts appeared primarily in con
nection -with discussions of the self-made artist or of national monu
ments or with exaltation of American art. What seemed to be impor
tant to the compilers of school readers was not the aesthetic content of
an artist s work but his career as evidence of the virtues of assiduous
application. Benjamin West was portrayed as having been too poor as a
boy to buy paint brushes and as having plucked hairs from his cat s
tail to enable himself to paint: "Thus we see that, by industry, in
genuity, and perseverance, a little American boy became the most
distinguished painter of his day in England/ But if a career in art
could be a means of disciplining character, it also had its dangers.
An excerpt from the eighteenth-century English moralist, Hannah
More, was exhumed to suggest "that in all polished countries an entire
devotedness to the fine arts has been one grand source of the cor
ruption of women . . . and while corruption brought on by an ex
cessive cultivation of the arts has contributed its full share to the
decline of states, it has always furnished an infallible symptom of their
impending fall," The Italians were commonly held up as an example
of a people -whose distinguished achievements in the arts went hand in
hand with an unsound national character. As time went on, it should
be said, the school readers showed an increasing disposition to point
to the development of American art and letters as an answer to Eu
ropean critics of American culture. Art, linked to national pride and
conceived as an instrument, was at least acceptable.

We cannot know, of course, how much impact the content of school
readers had on the minds of children. But any child -who accepted
the attitudes prevalent in these books would have come to think of
scholarship and the fine arts as embellishments identified with the
inferior society of Europe, would have thought of art primarily with
regard to its services to nationality, and would have judged it almost
entirely by its contributions to character. As Mrs. Elson puts it, he
would grow up "to be honest y industrious, religious, and moral. He

309 The School and the Teacher

-would be a useful citizen untouched by the effeminate and perhaps
even dangerous influence of the arts or scholarship/ The concept of
culture presented in his readers had prepared him for "a Me devoted
to the pursuit of material success and a perfected character, but a lif e
in which intellectual and artistic achievements would seem important
only when they could be made to subserve some useful purpose/*

These gleanings from the school readers suggest a clearer definition
of the American faith in education as it was manifested during the
nineteenth century. Perhaps the most touching aspect of this faith was
the benevolent determination that education should not be exclusive,
that it should be universally accessible. With impressive success this
determination was executed: the schools were made into powerful
agencies for the diffusion of social and economic opportunities. Amer
icans were somewhat less certain about what the internal, qualitative
standards of education should be and, in so far as they could define
these standards, had difficulty in implementing them on the large
scale on which their educational efforts were conceived. The function
of education in inculcating usable skills and in broadening social op
portunities was always clear. The value of developing the mind for
intellectual or imaginative achievement or even contemplative enjoy
ment was considerably less clear and less subject to common agree
ment. Many Americans were troubled by the suspicion that an edu
cation of this land was suitable only to the leisured classes, to
aristocracies, to the European past; that its usefulness was less evident
than its possible dangers; that an undue concern with the development
of mind was a form of arrogance or narcissism which one would expect
to find mainly in the morally corrupt.

* 4 "

American reluctance to accept intellectual values in the educational
process could hardly have been overcome by a strong, respected
teaching profession, since such a profession did not exist. Popular
attitudes did not call for the development of such a profession, but
even if they had, the conditions of American life made it difficult to
recruit and train a first-rate professional corps.

The figure of the schoolteacher may well be taken as a central
symbol in any modern society. The teacher is, or at least can be, the
first more or less full-time, professional representative of the life of the
mind who enters into the experience of most children; and the feeling

EDUCATION IN A DEMOCRACY 310

the child entertains toward the teacher, his awareness of the com
munity s regard for the teacher, are focal points in the formation of
his early, rudimentary notions about learning. This is, of course, some
what less important in the primary school, where the essential work is
the inculcation of elementary skills, than it is in the secondary school,
where the rapidly awakening mind of the child begins to be engaged
with the world of ideas. At any level, however, from the primary grades
to the university, the teacher is not merely an instructor but a potential
personal model for his (or her) pupils and a living clue to the attitudes
that prevail in the adult world. From teachers children derive much of
their sense of the way in which the mind is cultivated; from observing
how their teachers are esteemed and rewarded they quickly sense
how society looks upon the teacher s role.

In countries where the intellectual functions of education are highly
valued, like France, Germany, and the Scandinavian countries, the
teacher, especially the secondary-school teacher, is likely to be an im
portant local figure representing a personal and vocational ideal
worthy of emulation. There it seems worth becoming a teacher be
cause what the teacher does is worth doing and is handsomely
recognized. The intellectually alert and cultivated teacher may have a
particular importance for intelligent children whose home environ
ment is not highly cultivated; such children have no alternative source
of mental stimulation- All too often, however, in the history of the
United States, the schoolteacher has been in no position to serve as a
model for an introduction to the intellectual life. Too often he has not
only no claims to an intellectual life of his own, but not even an
adequate workmanlike competence in the skills he is supposed to
impart. Regardless of his own quality, his low pay and common lack
of personal freedom have caused the teachers role to be associated
with exploitation and intimidation.

That American teachers are not well rewarded or esteemed is almost
universally recognized in contemporary comment. A few years ago
Marion Folsom, then Secretary of Health, Education, and Welfare, ob
served that the "national disgrace" of our teachers salaries reflected
"the lack of respect accorded to teaching by the public." 6 Reminders
of this situation constantly appear in the press. One day the public
learns that a city in Michigan pays its teachers $400 a year less than
its garbage collectors; another that a group of teachers in Florida,
finding that the governor pays his cook $3,600 a year, have written to

e The New York Times, November 3, 1957*

311 The School and the Teacher

point out that the cook is paid more than many of the state s college-
educated teachers. 7 Like other Americans, teachers live better in ab
solute terms than their European counterparts, but their annual sala
ries, relative to the per capita income of their country, have been
lower than those of teachers in every country of the Western world,
except Canada. The American teacher s average annual salary in 1949
stood in a ratio of 1.9 to the per capita income; the comparable figure
was 2.5 in England, 5.1 in France, 4.7 in the West German Republic,
3.1 in Italy, 3.2 in Denmark, and 3.6 in Sweden. 8

The status of schoolteaching as an occupation is lower in this coun
try than elsewhere, and it is far lower than that of the professions
in the United States. Characteristically, as Myron Lieberman remarks,
teachers are recruited "from the top of the lower half of the popu
lation." Upper and upper-middle class persons almost universally re
ject teaching as a vocation. Teachers frequently resort, during the
school year or their summer "vacations," to low-status jobs to supple
ment their teaching incomes; they work as waitresses, bartenders,
housekeepers, janitors, farm hands, checkroom attendants, milkmen,
common laborers, and the like. They come from culturally constricted
lower- or middle-class homes, where the Saturday Evening Post or
the Readers Digest is likely to be the characteristic reading matter. 9
For most teachers, their jobs, inadequate though they are, represent
some improvement over the economic position of their parents, and
they will, in turn, do still better by their children, who will be better
educated than they are.

There is reason to believe, despite the sensationalism of The Black
board Jungle and the obviously chaotic conditions of many urban
slum schools, that the personal rapport between teachers and pupils in
American secondary schools is good; it is particularly good among
middle- and upper-class children, who are responsive to the educa
tional goals of the schools and who tend to be favored by the teachers

7 Ibid., March 24, 1957.

8 Myron Lieberman: Education as a Profession (New York, 1956), p* 383;
chapter 12 of this work is informative on the economic position of American teach
ers. The comparative disadvantage of American teachers registered in these figures
does not take into account a variety of valuable non-salaried forms of compensation
available elsewhere, like retirement allowances and free medical treatment.

9 The best brief discussion of the occupational status of teachers is that of Lieber
man: op. cit., chapter 14. There are studies indicating that teachers enjoy a higher
social status than i have indicated, but they are based upon opinion polling, a
technique which in my opinion yields very poor results on matters of status. On the
position of teachers, see also the excellent and rather neglected book by Willard
Waller: The Sociology of Teaching ( New York, 1932 ) .

EDUCATION IN A DEMOCRACY 312

over lower-class children even when the latter show equal ability. But
the important fact is that American adolescents have more sympathy
than admiration for their teachers. They know that their teachers are
ill-paid and they are quick to agree that teachers should be better paid.
The more ambitious and able among them also conclude that school-
teaching is not for them. 1 In this way, the mediocrity of the teaching
profession tends to perpetuate itself. In so far as the teacher stands
before his pupils as a surrogate of the intellectual life and its rewards,
he unwittingly makes this life appear altogether unattractive.

The unenviable situation of the teacher can be traced back to the
earliest days of our history. The educational enthusiasm of the Amer
ican people was never keen enough to dispose them to support their
teachers very well. In part this seems to have reflected a common
Anglo-American attitude toward the teaching function, which was
sharply different from that prevailing on the European Continent. 2
In any case, the market in qualified labor was always a problem
here, and early American communities had intense difficulties in find
ing and keeping suitable schoolmasters. In colonial times there "was a
limited supply of educated men, and they were blessed with too many
opportunities to be content to settle for what the average community
was willing to pay a schoolmaster. Various solutions were tried. Some
elementary education was conducted by women in "dame schools,"
usually private but sometimes partly or largely paid for out of public
funds; though it was not until well on in the nineteenth century that
American communities generally turned to women for their supply of

1 On the attitude of teen-agers toward their teachers, see H. H. Remmers and
D. BL Radler: The American Teenager (Indianapolis, 1957); on class factors in
die relations between teachers and pupils, see August B. Hollingshead: Elmtoton s
Youth (New York, 1949) ; and W, Lloyd Warner, Robert J. Havighurst, and Martin
B. Loeb: Who Shall Be Educated? ( New York, 1944 ) .

2 Presumably the labor market was somewhat different in England in the early
nineteenth century, but the social and economic conditions of teachers in public
education seem less enviable than that of Americans. See Asher Tropp: The
School Teachers (London, 1957). Somewhat revealing in this connection was the
remark of one of Her Majesty s Inspectors, H. S. Tremenheere, on a visit to the
United States in the iSso s. He wrote: "Any one from England visiting those
schools would be also greatly struck with the very high social position, considering
the nature of their employment, of the teachers, male and female. . . /* Notes on
Public Subjects Made during a Tour in the United States and Canada (London,
1852.), pp. 57-8- I believe the phrase I have italicized here would have been
intelligible to English and American readers and quite mystifying to most readers
on the Continent. For another English observer, who found the status of
American teachers high, though their pay was equally bad as in England, see
Francis Adams: The Free School System of the United States (London, 1875),
especially pp. 176-8, 181-2, 194-5, 197-8,5138.

313 The School and the Teacher

schoolteachers. In some towns the minister doubled as a schoolmaster;
or the schoolmaster doubled as a local man of all work, with a variety of
civic and church duties ranging from ringing the church bells to
serving as the local scribe, the town crier, or the town clerk. Others
accepted the fact that a permanent schoolmaster was all but an im
possibility and employed briefly a series of ambitious young men who
were on the way to other careers, perhaps in the ministry or the law.
Thus, many communities were able temporarily to secure able teachers
of good character, but the very transience of their role seemed to estab
lish the point that teaching was no better than a way station in life for
a man of real ability and character.

Men permanently fixed in the role of schoolmaster seem often to
have been of indifferent quality and extraordinarily ill-suited for the
job. Perhaps it is because only the pathological aspects of a situation
usually make historical news that Willard S. Elsbree, writing about
the character of the colonial schoolmaster, in his history, The American
Teacher., tells us mainly about drunkenness, slander, profanity, law
suits, and seductions. 3 But it is also suggestive that colonial communi
ties sometimes had to resort to indentured servants for teachers. A
Delaware minister observed, around 1725, that "when a ship arrives in
the river, it is a common expression with those who stand in need of an
instructor for their children, let us go and buy a school master! 9 In
1776 the Maryland Journal advertised that a ship had just arrived at
Baltimore from Belfast and Cork, and enumerated among its products
for sale "various Irish commodities, among which are school masters,
beef, pork, and potatoes." It was about the same time that the Connect
icut press printed an advertisement offering a reward for a runaway
described as "a school-master, of a pale complexion, with short hair.
He has the itch very bad, and sore legs." Disabled men were fre
quently turned into schoolteachers for lack of anything better to do
with them. The town of Albany in 1673 added a local baker to its
existing staff of three teachers because, it said, "Tie was impotent in his
hand." 4 Although such choices may have been motivated by a mis
placed philanthropy, they also reflected a persistent difficulty in find
ing qualified men. Massachusetts alone stood out as having enough
educated men so that a significant proportion of college graduates
were schoolmasters.

3 The American Teacher ( New York, 1939 ) , chapter 2-.

4 Howard K. Beale: A History of Freedom of Teaching in American Schools
(New York, 1941), pp. 1112,; Elsbree: op. cit., pp. 2-67, 34.

EDUCATION IN A DEMOCBACY 314

Although competent and dedicated schoolmasters could be found
from time to time, the misfits seem to have been so conspicuous that
they set an unflattering image of the teaching profession. "The truth
is," an observer wrote in 1725, "the office and character of such a
person is generally very mean and contemptible here, and it cannot
be other ways *til the public takes the Education of Children into
their mature consideration." 5 The tradition seems to have persisted
well on into the nineteenth century, when we find this sad confession:
"The man who was disabled to such an extent that he could not en
gage in manual labor who was lame, too fat, too feeble, had the
phthisic or had fits or was too lazy to work well, they usually made
schoolmasters out of these, and thus got what \vork they could out of
them." There was a train of stereotypes of this order: the one-eyed or
one-legged teacher, the teacher who had been driven out of the minis
try by his weakness for drink, the lame teacher, the misplaced fiddler,
and "the teacher who got drunk on Saturday and whipped the entire

school on Monday/" 6

^

The concern of serious educators with the caliber of teachers was
general and knew no bounds of geography. James Gordon Carter,
describing the Massachusetts schools as they were in 1824, declared
that 7 the men teachers could be divided into three classes: ( i ) Those
who thought teaching easier and possibly more remunerative than
common labor. (2) Those -who were acquiring a good education, and
who took up teaching as a temporary employment, either to earn
money for necessities or to give themselves time to choose a regular
profession. (3) Those who, conscious of weakness, despaired of
distinction or even the means of subsistence by other employments:
"If a young man be moral enough to keep out of State prison, he will
find no difficulty in getting approbation for a schoolmaster/*

Some years later President Joseph Caldwell of the University of
North Carolina waxed indignant about the recruitment of the school
teachers of his state: s

5 Beale: op. cit., p. 13.

6 R. Carlyle Buley: op. cit,, Vol. II, pp. 3701.

7 James G. Carter: The Schools of Massachusetts in 182,4, Old South Leaflets No.
135, PP- 15-16, 19, 21.

8 Beale: op. cit., p. 93; cf. the early treatise on teaching, Samuel Hall s Lectures
on School-Keeping (Boston, 1829), especially pp. 26-8. On the condition of the
teaching profession in the Southwest ("The great mass of our teachers are mere
adventurers"), see Philip Lindsley in Richard Hofstadter and Wilson Smith, eds.:
American Higher Education: A Documentary History (Chicago, 1961), Vol. I,
PP- 332-3-

315 The School and the Teacher

Is a man constitutionally and habitually indolent, a burden
upon all from whom he can extract support? Then there is one way
of shaking him off, let us make him a schoolmaster. To teach school
is, in the opinion of many, little else than sitting still and doing
nothing. Has any man wasted all his property, or ended in debt by
indiscretion and misconduct? The business of school-keeping
stands -wide open for his reception, and here he sinks to the
bottom, for want of capacity to support himself. Has any one
ruined himself, and done all he could to corrupt others, by dis
sipation, drinking, seduction, and a course of irregularities? Nay,
has he returned from prison after an ignominious atonement for
some violation of the laws? He is destitute of character and can
not be trusted, but presently he opens a school and the children
are seen flocking into it, for if he is willing to act in that capacity,
we shall all admit that as he can read and -write, and cypher to the
square root, he will make an excellent schoolmaster,

And what, after all, was the dominant stereotype of the schoolmaster
in American literature if not Washington Irving s Ichabod Crane?

The cognomen of Crane was not inapplicable to his person. He
was tall, but exceedingly lank, with narrow shoulders, long arms
and legs, hands that dangled a mile out of his sleeves, feet that
might have served for shovels, and his whole frame most loosely
hung together. His head was small, and flat at the top, with huge
ears, large, green, glassy eyes, and a long, snip nose, so that it
looked like a weather-cock perched upon his spindle neck to tell
-which way the wind blew. To see him striding along the profile o
a hill on a windy day, with his clothes bagging and fluttering about
him, one might have mistaken him for the genius of Famine
descending upon the earth or some scarecrow eloped from a corn
field.

As Irving portrayed him, Ichabod Crane was not altogether a bad
fellow. In the course of boarding around, he did what he could to make
himself agreeable to the families of the farmers, undertook a wide
variety o chores and dandled and petted the young children. Among
the women of the community he cut a figure of some importance, being
somewhat more cultivated than the bumpkins they ordinarily met. But
this "odd mixture of small shrewdness and simple credulity** was no
hero to the men, and when Brom Bones in his ghastly masquerade

EDUCATION IN A DEMOCRACY 316

frightened Ichabod out o town and smashed a pumpkin on his credu
lous head, he was passing the symbolic judgment of the American
male community on the old-time schoolmaster.

* 5 *

Complaints such as those of Caldwell and Carter, men who hoped
to work some educational reform, probably exaggerated the case; but
if they did, they only reflected a stereotype of the teacher that had
fixed itself in the mind of the country. A vicious circle had been drawn.
American communities had found it hard to find, train, or pay for good
teachers. They settled for what they could get, and what they got was a
high proportion of misfits and incompetents. They tended to conclude
that teaching was a trade which attracted rascals, and, having so con
cluded, they were reluctant to pay the rascals more than they were
worth. To be sure, there is evidence that the competent schoolteacher
of good character was eagerly welcomed when he could be found,
and soon earned a status in the community higher than that of his
colleagues elsewhere; but it was a long time before any considerable
effort could be made to improve the caliber of teachers generally.

What helped American education to break out of the vicious circle
was the development of the graded primary school and the emergence
of the woman teacher. The graded school, a response to the educational
problems of the largest cities, began to develop in the 1820*3 and had
become prevalent by 1860. In the latter year most cities had such
schools, which pupils entered at about six and could leave at fourteen.
The graded school, modeled largely on the German system, made
possible smaller classrooms holding more homogeneous groups of pu
pils and did much to put American teaching on a respectable basis. It
also increased the need for teachers and opened the trade to women.
Until 1830, most teachers had been men, and women had dealt mainly
with very small children and summer classes. The notion prevailed
that women were inadequate to the disciplinary problems of the
schoolroom, especially in large classes and more advanced age groups.
The emergence of the graded school provided a partial answer to
these objections. Opponents of women teachers were still to be heard
in many communities, but they were often easily silenced when it was
pointed out that women teachers could be paid one third or one half
as much as men. Here was one answer to the great American quest to
educate everybody but to do it cheaply. By 1860 women teachers

317 The School and the Teacher

outnumbered men in some states, and the Civil War accelerated the
replacement of men. By 1870 it is estimated that women constituted
almost sixty per cent of the teaching force, and their numbers were
increasing rapidly. By 1900 over seventy per cent of teachers were
women, and in another quarter of a century the figure reached a peak
of over eighty-three per cent. 9

Acceptance of the woman teacher solved the problem of character
as well as that of cost, since it was possible to find a fair supply of
admirable young girls to work at low pay and to keep them at work as
teachers only so long as their personal conduct met the rigid and some
times puritanical standards set by school boards. But it did not al
together solve the problem of competence. The new teachers were
characteristically very young and poorly prepared. For a long time
there were practically no public facilities to give them specialized
training, and private seminaries for the purpose were not numerous,
European countries experimented with the training of teachers for
more than a century before the United States gave much thought
to it. Horace Mann was instrumental in establishing the first public
normal school in Massachusetts in 1839; but at the beginning of the
Civil War there were only a dozen such institutions. They proliferated
rapidly after 1862; yet at the end of the century they were still unable
to keep pace with the rapidly growing demand for teachers. In 1898
only a small proportion of new teachers perhaps about one fifth
was taken from public or private schools of this order.

Moreover, the training these schools offered was not very exalted.
Their admissions standards were haphazard, and even as late as 1900
a high-school diploma was seldom considered a prerequisite of en
trance. Two years of high-school work, or the equivalent, was usually
the prelude to two or three years of normal school. The four-year
normal school became prevalent only after 1920, by which time it was
beginning to be superseded by the teachers* college. Even in 1930,
a survey by the United States Office of Education showed that only
eighteen per cent of the country s current graduates of teachers
colleges and normal schools had had four-year courses. Two thirds of
them were products of one-year or two-year curricula. 1

In spite of the considerable effort made by American communities

9 Elsbree: op. cit., pp. 194208, 5534. By 1956 the figure had fallen to seventy-
three per cent. Women school teachers received about two thirds the salaries of
men in rural areas. In the cities, where pay was higher for both, they tended at
first to get only a little more than one third of the salaries of men.

1 Elsbree: op. cit., pp. 31134.

EDUCATION IN A DEMOCRACY 318

to meet the demand for competent teachers around the turn of the
century and afterwards, they were engaged in a taxing race with the
explosive growth of the school population; and the excess of demand
over supply in the market for teachers militated against efforts to
raise standards of preparation. The best estimates for 191920 indicate
that half of America s schoolteachers were under twenty-five, half
served in the schools for not more than four or five years, and half had
had no more than four years of education beyond the eighth grade.
A period of rapid improvement at least in the quantitative dimension
of teacher education ensued in the next several years. | But in 1933,
when the United States Office of Education published its National
Survey of the Education of Teachers, it found that only ten per cent
of the elementary teachers of the country, and only fifty-six per cent of
the junior high-school teachers and eighty-five per cent of the senior
high-school teachers, had B.A. degrees.^ Education beyond the B.A.
degree was almost negligible except among senior high-school teach
ers, of whom a little more than one sixth had taken their M.A/s. A
comparison of teacher education in America and in selected countries
of Western Europe showed the United States to be at some consider
able disadvantage, significantly behind England and far behind
France, Germany, and Sweden. "What inspires grave concern," wrote
the authors of the survey, "is the fact that students in general and
important groups of teachers in particular were not much more intelli
gent than a cross-section of the population at large/ 2

To what extent able students stayed out of teaching because of its
poor rewards and to what extent because of the nonsense that figured
so prominently in teacher education, it is difficult to say. That teachers
did not have enough training in the subjects they intended to teach
was clear enough; but even more striking was the fact that, however
prepared they might be in the field of their major interest, their
chances of teaching in that field were no better than fair. The survey s
collation of existing studies showed that a high-school teacher with a
good preparation in an academic subject had hardly better than a
fifty per cent chance of being assigned to teach it. In part this may
have been a consequence of administrative negligence, but mainly it

2 E. S. Evenden: "Summary and Interpretation/* National Survey of the Educa
tion of Teachers, Vol. VI (Washington, 1935), pp. 32, 49, 89. For later information
on the caliber of persons entering education, see Henry Chauncey: < *The Use of
Selective Service College Qualification Test in the Deferment of College Students,"
Science, Vol. CXVI (July 25, 1952), pp. 739. See also Lieberrnan: op. cit, pp.
227-31.

3*9 The School and the Teacher

was attributable to the large number of uueconomicalry small high
schools about whiel| James Bryant Conant Was still complaining in

As one looks at the history of teacher training in the United States,
one can hardly escape Elsbree s conclusion that "in our efforts to sup
ply enough teachers for the public schools we have sacrificed quality
for quantity.** 4 The prevailing assumption was that everyone should
get a common-school education, and on the whole this was realized,
outside the South. But the country could not or would not make the
massive effort that would have been necessary to supply highly trained
teachers for this attempt to educate everybody. The search for cheap
teachers was perennial. Schoolteachers were considered to be public
officers, and it was part of the American egalitarian philosophy that
the salaries of public officers should not be too high. In colonial times
salaries of schoolmasters, which varied widely, seem on the whole to
have been roughly on a par with or below the wages of skilled laborers
and distinctly below those of professional men. In 1843 Horace Mann,
after making a survey of wages of various occupational groups in a
Massachusetts community, reported that skilled workers were getting
from fifty to a hundred per cent more than was being paid to any of
the district schoolteachers of the same town. He found women teachers
getting less than women factory workers. A New Jersey school ad
ministrator in 1855 believed that although teachers were generally
"miserably qualified for their duties," they were "even better prepared
than they can afford to be." It was absurd, he pointed out, to expect
men of ability and promise to work for a teacher s pay, and chiefly for
this reason "the very name of teacher has been, and is yet to some
extent, a term of reproach." Many a farmer would pay a better price
for shoeing his horse than he would "to obtain a suitable individual to
mould and form the character of his child." 5

Certainly what was lacking in salary was not made up in dignity or

3 On the strength of his observations, Conant concluded that "unless a graduat
ing class contains at least one hundred students, classes in advanced subjects and
separate sections within all classes become impossible except with extravagantly
high costs." His survey showed that 73.9 per cent of the country s high schools had
twelfth-grade enrollments of less than a hundred, and that 31.8 per cent of the
twelfth-grade pupils were in such schools. The American High School Today (New
York, 1959), pp. 37-~8, 7785, 1323. Of course, an important reason for the failure
to make good use of the academic specialities of teachers was the practice of
specifying requirements in education courses for teachers* certificates but paying
insufficient attention to academic requirements.

* Op. cit., p. 334.

6 Ibid., p. 5173; for Mann, see pp. 279-80.

EDUCATION IN A DEMOCRACY 320

status. Moreover, the growing numerical preponderance o the woman
teacher, which did so much to cure the teaching profession of the taint
of bad character, created a new and serious problem. Elsewhere in
the world the ideal prevails and the actual recruitment of teachers
by and large conforms to it that men should play a vital role in
education generally, and a preponderant role in secondary education.
The United States is the only country in the Westernized world that
has put its elementary education almost exclusively in the hands of
women and its secondary education largely so. In 1953 this country
stood almost alone among the nations of the world in the f eminization
of its teaching: women constituted ninety-three per cent of its pri
mary teachers and sixty per cent of its secondary teachers. Only one
country in Western Europe (Italy, with fifty- two per cent) employed
women for more than half of its secondary-school personnel. 6
I The point is not, of course, that women are inferior to men as
teachers (in fact, at some levels, and particularly in the lower grades of
the elementary school, there is reason to think that women teachers
are preferable). But in America, where teaching has been identified as
a feminine profession, it does not offer men the stature of a fully
legitimate male role. The American masculine conviction that educa
tion and culture are feminine concerns is thus confirmed, and no doubt
partly shaped, by the experiences of boys in school. There are often
not enough male models or idols among their teachers whose per
formance will convey the sense that the world of mind is legitimately
male, who can give them masculine examples of intellectual inquiry
or cultural life, and who can be regarded as sufficiently successful and
important in the world to make it conceivable for vigorous boys to
eater teaching themselves for a Iivelihood.\The boys grow up thinking
of men teachers as somewhat effeminate and treat them with a curious
mixture of genteel deference (of the sort due to women) and hearty
male condescension. 7 In a certain constricted sense, the male teacher
may be respected, but he is not "one of the boys/*

6 Lieberman: op. cit., p. 244, gives figures for twenty-five countries. Four Western
countries, the United Kingdom, France, West Germany, and Canada, ranged from
thirty-four per cent female secondary teachers to forty-five per cent the average
being forty-one per cent. In the U.S.S.R., sixty per cent of primary and forty-five
per cent of secondary school teachers are women. See ibid., pp. .24155, for a dis
cussion of this problem*

7 See, for example, the incident recounted by Waller i op. cit., pp. 4950. "It has
been said," Waller remarks, "that no woman and no Negro is ever folly admitted
to the white man s world. Perhaps we should add men teachers to the list of the ex
cluded." The problem is somewhat complicated by the aura of sexlessness that
hangs over the public image of the teaching profession, and by the long-prevailing

The School and the Teacher

But this question of the maleness of the teacher s role is only a small
part of a large problem. In the nineteenth century men had all too
often entered schoolteaching either transiently as a step on the way
to becoming lawyers, ministers, politicians, or college professors or as
a final confession of failure in more worthwhile occupations. Even
today, surveys show, the ablest men tend to enter teaching in the
expectation that they will become educational administrators or leave
the field entirely. In recent decades a new area has opened up which
may drain able men, and women as well, out of the public secondary-
school: the emergence of large numbers of heavily attended junior or
community colleges has made it possible for enterprising teachers with
an extra increment of ability and training to step up from the high
school, or sidestep it altogether, in favor of an institution which offers
an easier way of life as well as better pay and more prestige. There,
however, some of the instruction they offer will be of a kind which
could as well be offered in an efficient, first-rate secondary school.
Giving the thirteenth and fourteenth years of public education a
separate institutional setting may have a variety of advantages, but it
does not in itself add to the total store of the country s teaching talents.
In its pursuit of an adequate supply of well-trained teachers, the na
tion is caught in a kind of academic treadmill. The more adequate the
rewards become in the upper echelons of education in the colleges

prejudice against the married woman teacher. Nineteenth-century America was
dominated by a curious conviction, probably somewhat dissipated in the more
recent past, that teachers ought to be oddities in their personal lives a conviction
that was easy to enforce in small towns. No doubt the conviction had been
quickened by unhappy experiences with the schoolmaster-scamp, but it seems also
to have been shaped by the desire to have children schooled by sexual ciphers.
This desire lingered to torment many a perfectly innocent girl even in our own
time, and where imposed put hopeless restrictions on the lives o well-intentioned
schoolmasters. See the touching letter o protest written in 1852, by a schoolmaster
against efforts to prevent him from walking to and from school with his female as
sistant. Elsbree: op. cit., pp. 3002. Howard Beale s Are American Teachers Free?
has ample information on the personal restrictions imposed on teachers. I particularly
like a pledge forced on all teachers in a Southern community in 1927, in which one
of a number of promises was: "I promise not to fall in love, to become engaged or
secretly married." "Waller: op. cit., p. 43. Even today, Martin Mayer observes: "It is
an interesting fact that most European schools are for boys or girls, but the teachers
mingle freely, regardless of sex; most American schools are co-educational, but
the teachers are rigidly segregated by sex during their time off." The Schools
(New York, 1961), p. 4. Finally, the prevailing old-time prejudice against the
married woman teacher, commonly carried to the point of compulsory job severance
for teachers who marry, used to confine the female side of the profession in many
places to spinsters and very young girls. For the reasons usually invoked for barring
married women, see D. W. Peters: The Status of the Married Woman Teacher
(New York, 1934).

EDUCATION IN A DEMOCRACY

and junior colleges and the higher the proportion o the young popu
lation that attends such institutions, the greater their capacity becomes
to pull talent out of the lower levels of the system. It remains difficult
to find enough trained talent to educate large masses in a society that
does not make teaching attractive.

E 3^3 I
CHAPTER XIII

The Road
to Life Adjustment

T.

appearance within professional education of an influential
anti-intellectualist movement is one of the striking features of Amer
ican thought. To understand this movement, which has its most signifi
cant consequences in the education of adolescents, one must look at
the main changes in public education since 1870. It was in the iS/o s
that this country began to develop free public secondary education on
a large scale, and only in the twentieth century that the public high
school became a mass institution.

Here certain peculiarities of American education are of the first
importance above all, its democratic assumptions and the universality
of its aims. Outside the United States it is not assumed that all children
should be schooled for so many years or so uniformly. The educational
systems of most European countries were frankly tailored to their class
systems, although they have become less so in our time. In Europe
children are generally schooled together only until the age of ten or
eleven; after that they go separate ways in specialized schools, or at
least in specialized curricula. After fourteen, about eighty per cent
are finished with their formal education and the rest enter academic
pre-university schools. In the United States children must be in school
until the age of sixteen or more, and a larger portion of them are sent
to college than in European countries are sent to academic secondary
schools. Americans also prefer to keep their secondary-school children

EDUCATION IN A DEMOCBACY 324

in school under a single roof, usually the comprehensive community
high school, ^nd on a single educational track ( though not in a uniform
curriculum). They are not, ideally, meant to be separated, either
socially or academically, according to their social class; though the
relentless social realities of poverty and ethnic prejudice intervene to
preserve most of the class selectivity that our democratic educational
philosophy repudiatesjln any case, the decision as to a child s ultimate
vocational destiny does not have to be made so early in this country as
elsewhere, if only because it is not institutionalized by the demands of
early educational classification. In the United States specialized prep
aration even for the professions is postponed to graduate education
or at best to the last two years of college. American education serves
larger numbers for a longer period of time. It is more universal, more
democratic, more leisurely in pace, less rigorous. It is also more -waste
ful; class-oriented systems are prodigal of the talents of the under
privileged; American education tends to be prodigal of talent gener
ally.

The difference in structure was not always so great, especially in
secondary schooling. Before the mass public high school emerged,
American practice in secondary education was less in keeping with
our democratic theory than with the selective European idea. During
the nineteenth century, public education for most Americans ended
with the last years of the graded primary school, if not earlier jFree
education beyond the primary-school years was established only in the
three decades after iS/oi Before 1870, the class system, here as well as
in Europe, was a primary determinant of the schooling children v^ould
get after the age of about thirteen or fourteen. Well-to-do parents,
who could afford tuition and -who had intellectual or professional
aspirations for their children, could send them to private academies,
which were often boarding schools. Since the days of Franklin these
academies had offered a mixture of the traditional and the "practical":
there was a liberal, classical course, founded upon Latin, Greek, and
mathematics, commonly supplemented by science and history; but in
many schools the students had an option between the "Latin course"
and the "English course," the latter being a more "practical" and
modern curriculum stressing subjects supposedly useful in business.
Academies varied widely in quality, duplicating, in their lowest ranges,
some of the work of the common schools and, at their peak, some of the
work of the colleges. The best of them were so good that graduates

The Road to Life Adjustment

who went on to college were likely to be bored by repetition in the
first and even the second college year. 1

The disparity between the country s moral commitment to educa
tional democracy and its heavy reliance upon private schools for
secondary education did not escape the attention of educational critics.
On one side there were the generally available public primary schools;
on the other, the rapidly proliferating colleges and universities not
free, of course, but cheap and undiscriminating. In between there was
an extensive gap, filled by a few pioneering public high schools, but
mainly by the private academies, of which it is estimated there were
in 1850 about six thousand. As early as the 1830*5 the academies were
denounced as exclusive, aristocratic, and un-American. For a nation
already committed to the free common-school system, the extension
of this system into the years of secondary education seemed a logical
and necessary step. Industry was growing; vocational life was becom
ing more complex. Skills were more in demand, and it seemed that
both utility and equality would be well served by free public educa
tion in the secondary years.

Advocates of the public high school had strong moral and vocational
arguments, and the legal basis for their proposals already existed in
the common-school system. Shortsightedness and mean-spirited tax-
consciousness stood in their way, but not for long. The number of pub
lic high schools began to rise with great and increasing rapidity after
1860. From 1890 (when usable enrollment figures begin) to 1940,
the total enrollment of the high schools nearly doubled every decade.
By 1910, thirty-five per cent of the seventeen-year-olds were in school;
today the figure has reached over seventy per cent. At this tempo
the high school has become an institution which nearly all American
youth enter, and from which about two thirds graduate.

Whatever may be said about the qualitative performance of the
American high school, which varies widely from place to place, no one
is likely to deny that the free secondary education of youth was a

1 It was not necessary to go to an academy to prepare for college; one could also
enroll in the "preparatory departments" many colleges maintained to give prospec
tive applicants enough grounding in classics, mathematics, and English to enter
upon the college course proper. The existence of a large number of such prepara
tory departments as late as 1889, 335 of 400 colleges still had them is testimony
of the inadequacy of the secondary schools to prepare for college requirements
those who wanted to go to college. Edgar B, Wesley: N.E.A.: The First Hundred
Years (New York, 1957), p. 95. On the academies, see E. E. Brown: The Making
of Our Middle Schools ( New York, 1903 ) .

EDUCATION IN A DEMOCRACY 326

signal accomplishment in the history of education, a remarkable token
of our desire to make schooling an instrument of mass opportunity and
social mobility. Since I shall have much to say about the high school s
cunicular problems, it seems important here to stress the positive
value of this achievement, and to note that, in its democratic features,
if not in its educational standards, the American high school has been
to some degree emulated by European school systems in the last gen
eration.

The development of the high school into a mass institution dras
tically altered its character. At the turn of the century the relatively
small clientele of the high school was still highly selective. Its pupils
were there, in the main, because they wanted to be, because they and
their parents had seized upon the unusual opportunity the high school
offered. It is often said, but mistakenly, that the high school, sixty or
seventy years ago, was primarily attended by those preparing for
college. This was less true than it has come to be in the past fifteen
years. Today approximately half the high-school graduates enter col
lege an astonishing proportion. I do not know what proportion of the
high-school graduates actually entered college at the turn of the cen
tury, but there is information as to how many of them were so pre
pared. In 1891, twenty-nine per cent of the graduates were. By 1910
the portion of those prepared for college and other advanced institu
tions was forty-nine per cent. The figure has fluctuated since. 2

The great change which has affected the high school is that, whereas
once it was altogether voluntary, and for this reason quite selective, it
is now, at least for those sixteen and under, compulsory and unselec-
tive. During the very years when the high school began its most
phenomenal growth, the Progressives and trade unionists were assailing
the old industrial evil of child labor. One of the most effective devices
to counteract this practice was raising the terminal age for compulsory
schooling. In 1890, twenty-seven states required compulsory attend
ance; by 1918 all states had such laws. Legislators also became more
exigent in fixing the legal age for leaving school. In 1900 it was set at a
mean age of fourteen years and five months in those states which then
had such laws. By the igso s it was close to the figure it has reached
today a mean age of sixteen years and three months. The welfare

2 ee John F. Latimer: What s Happened to Our High Schools? (Washington,
195S), pp. 75-8- For a penetrating brief account of the place o secondary educa
tion in American society since 1870, see Martin Trow: "The Second Transforma
tion of American Secondary Education," International Journal of Comparative
Sociology, Vol. II (September, 1961), pp. 144-66.

327 ^7i# Road to Life Adjustment

state and the powerful trade union, moreover, saw to it that these laws
were increasingly enforced. The young had to be protected from
exploitation; and their elders had to be protected by keeping the
young out of the labor market.

Now, in an increasing measure, secondary-school pupils were not
merely unselected but also unwilling; they were in high school not
because they wanted further study but because the law forced them
to go. The burden of obligation was shifted accordingly: whereas once
the free high school offered a priceless opportunity to those who chose
to take it, the high school now held a large captive audience that its
administrators felt obliged to satisfy. As an educational committee of
the American Youth Commission -wrote in 1940: "Even where a pupil
is of low ability it is to be remembered that his attendance at secondary
school is due to causes which are not of his making, and proper pro
vision for him is a right which he is justified in claiming from society ." 3

As the years went by, the schools filled with a growing proportion
of doubtful, reluctant, or actually hostile pupils. It is a plausible con
jecture that the average level of ability, as well as interest, declined.
It became clear that the old academic curriculum could no longer be
administered to a high-school population of millions in the same pro
portion as it had been to the 359,000 pupils of 1890. So long as public
education had meant, largely, schooling in the primary grades, the
American conviction that everyone can and should be educated was
relatively easy to put into practice. But as soon as public education
included secondary education, it began to be more doubtful that
everyone could be educated, and quite certain that not everyone
could be educated in the same way. Beyond a doubt, change was in
order.

The situation of school administrators can hardly fail to command
our sympathies. Even in the 1920*5, to a very large degree, they had
been entrusted by the fiat of society with the management of quasi-
custodial institutions. For custodial institutions the schools were, to
the extent that they had to hold pupils uninterested in study but
bound to the school by the laws. Moreover, the schools were under
pressure not merely to fulfill the laws, but to become attractive enough
to hold the voluntary allegiance of as large a proportion of the young
for as long as they could. 4 Manfully settling down to their assignment,

3 What the High Schools Ought to Teach (Washington, 1940), pp. II-IA.

4 This was, of course, accentuated by the effects of the great depression and the
growing power of the trade unions. But even in 1918 the N.E.A. was advocating

EDUCATION IN A DEMOCBACY 328

educators began to search for more and more courses which, however
dubious their merits by traditional educational standards, might inter
est and attract the young. In time they became far less concerned with
the type of mind the high school should produce or with the academic
side of the curriculum. (Boys and girls who wanted to go to college
would hang on in any case; it was the others they had to please.)
Discussions of secondary education became more frequently inter
larded with references to a new, decisive criterion of performance
"the holding power of the school."

The need to accept large numbers with varying goals and capacities
and to exercise for many pupils a custodial function made it necessary
for the schools to introduce variety into their curricula. The curriculum
of the secondary school could hardly have been fixed at what it
was in 1890 or 1910. But the issue posed for those who would guide
public education was whether the academic content and intellectual
standards of the school should be made as high as possible for each
child, according to his will and his capacities, or whether there was
good ground for abandoning any such end. To have striven seriously
to keep up the intellectual content of the curriculum would have
required a public and an educational profession committed to intel
lectual values; it would have demanded much administrative in-
genuity; and in many communities it would have called for much more
generous financial support than the schools actually had.
| But all this is rather in the nature of an imaginative exercise. The
problem of numbers had hardly made its appearance before a move
ment began in professional education to exalt numbers over quality
and the alleged demands of utility over intellectual development. Far
from conceiving the mediocre., reluctant, or incapable student as an
obstacle or a special problem in a school system devoted to educating
the interested, the capable., and the gifted, American educators
entered upon a crusade to exalt the academically uninterested or un-
gifted child into a kind of culture-hero. They were not content to say
that the realities of American social lif e had made it necessary to com
promise with the ideal of education as the development of formal
learning and intellectual capacity. Instead, they militantly proclaimed
that such education was archaic and futile and that the noblest end of a
truly democratic system of education was to meet the child s immediate
interests by offering him a series of immediate utilities. The history of

that normal children be educated to the age of eighteen. Cardinal Principles of
Secondary Education (Washington, 1918), p. 30.

The Road to JLife Adjustment

this crusade, which culminated in the ill-fated life-adjustment move
ment of the 1940*8 and 1950*5, demands our attention; for it illustrates
in action certain widespread attitudes toward childhood and schooling,
character and ambition, and the place of intellect in life./

The rise of the new interpretation of secondary education may be
traced through a few examples of quasi-official statements by com
mittees of the National Education Association and the United States
Office of Education. These statements were, of course, not obligatory
upon local school boards or superintendents. They represent the
drift of educational thought without purporting to reflect exactly the
changes actually being made in curricular policy.

Toward the close of the nineteenth century, two contrasting views
of the purposes of the public high schools were already competing for
dominance. 5 The original view, which remained in the ascendant
until 1910 and continued to have much influence for at least another
decade, might be dubbed old-fashioned or intellectually serious, de
pending upon one s sympathy for it. The high school, it was believed
by those who held this view, should above all discipline and develop
the minds of its pupils through the study of academic subject matter.
Its well-informed advocates were quite aware that a majority of pupils
were not being educated beyond high school; but they argued that
the same education which was good preparation for college was good
preparation for life. Therefore, the goal of secondary education, even
when college was not the child s end-in-view, should be "mind cul
ture," as it was called by William T. Harris, one of the leading ad
vocates of the academic curriculum. Spokesmen of this school were
intensely concerned that the pupil, whatever the precise content of
his curriculum, should pursue every subject that he studied long
enough to gain some serious mastery of its content. ( In the continuing
debate over education the ideal of "mastery" of subject matter domi
nates the thinking of the intellectualists, whereas the ideal of meeting
the "needs * of children becomes the central conception of their op
ponents.)

The most memorable document expressing academic views on sec
ondary education was the famous report of the National Education

5 The general outlines of this controversy are sketched in Wesley: N.E.A.: The
First Hundred Years, pp. 66-77.

EDUCATION IN A DEMOCRACY 330

Association s Committee of Ten in 1893. This committee was created
to consider the chaos in the relations between colleges and secondary
schools and to make recommendations about the high-school curricu
lum. Its personnel, which reflected the dominance of college educa
tors, compares interestingly with that of later committees set up for
similar purposes* The chairman was President Charles William Eliot
of Harvard, and the members were William T. Harris, the Commis
sioner of Education, four other college or university presidents, the
headmasters of two outstanding private secondary schools, a college
professor, and only one public high-school principal. A series of sub
sidiary conferences set up by the committee to consider the place of the
major academic disciplines in high-school programs also showed col
lege authorities in full control. Although many principals and head
masters took part, there were also university professors whose names
are recognizable in American intellectual history Benjamin I.
Wheeler, George Toyman Kittredge, Florian Cajori, Simon Newcomb,
Ira Remsen, Charles K. Adams, Edward G. Bourne, Albert B. Hart,
James Harvey Robinson, and Woodrow Wilson.

The Committee of Ten recommended to the secondary schools a
set of four alternative courses a classical course, a Latin-scientific
course, a modern languages course, and an English course. These cur
ricula varied chiefly in accordance with their relative emphasis on the
classics, modern languages, and English. But all demanded, as a mini
mum, four years of English, four years of a foreign language, three
years of history, three years of mathematics, and three years of science.
In this respect, the contemporary reader will notice the close similarity
between this program and that recently recommended by James
Bryant Conant, in his survey of the high schools, as a minimum for
"academically talented boys and girls." 6

The curricula designed by the Committee of Ten show that they
thought of the secondary school as an agency for academic training,
But they did not make the mistake of thinking that these schools were
simply college-preparatory institutions. Quite the contrary, the com
mittee almost exaggerated the opposite point of view when it said that

6 Conant recommended four years of mathematics, four years of a foreign lan
guage, three years of science, four years of English, and three years of history and
social studies. In addition, he thought many academically talented pupils might
wish to take a second foreign language or an additional course in social studies.
The American High School Today (New York, 1959), p. 57. Conant felt that
minimum requirements for graduation for all students should include at least one
year of science, four years of English, and three or four years of social studies.

331 The Road to Life Adjustment

"only an insignificant percentage 7 * of high-school graduates went on to
colleges or scientific schools. The main function of high schools, said
the committee, was "to prepare for the duties of life/* not for college,
but if the main subjects were all "taught consecutively and thoroughly,
and ... all carried on in the same spirit ... all used for training the
powers of observation, memory, expression, and reasoning,* the pupil
would receive an intellectual training that was good for college prep
aration or for life: "Every subject which is taught at all in a secondary
school should be taught in the same way and to the same extent to
every pupil so long as he pursues it, no matter what the probable
destination of the pupil may be or at what point his education is to
cease.** 7

The committee recognized that it would be desirable to find a larger
place for music and art in the high schools, but it apparently found
these of secondary importance and proposed to leave decisions about
them to local initiative. Its members proposed, among other things,
that language instruction should be begun in the last four years of the
elementary schools, a suggestion that was lamentably ignored. They
realized that an improvement in the caliber of secondary-school
teachers was necessary to execute their recommendations effectively;
they urged that the low- standards of the normal schools be raised
and suggested that universities might interest themselves more deeply
in the adequate training of teachers.

In fact, the high schools had not developed entirely in accordance
with the committee s conservative ideal. Even in the iSSo s there had
been a considerable efflorescence of programs of practical and voca
tional training manual training, shop work, and other such studies.
Increasingly, those primarily concerned with the management and
curricula of high schools became restive about the continuing domi
nance of the academic ideal, which they considered arose from the
high schools* "slavery** and "subjugation** to the colleges. The high
schools, they insisted, were meant to educate citizens in their public

T For relevant passages, see Report of the Camxmittee on Secondary School
Studies Appointed at the Meeting of the National Education Association, July Q,
1892, (Washington, 1893), pp. 811, 16-17, 34 47> 51 5- The committee believed
that what pupils learned in high school should permit them to go to college if they
should later make that decision. Colleges and scientific schools should be able to
admit any graduate of a good secondary course, regardless of his program. At the
present time, the committee found, this was impossible because the pupil might
have gone through a high-school course "of a very feeble and scrappy nature
studying a little of many subjects and not much of any one, getting, perhaps, a little
information in a variety of fields, but nothing which can be called a thorough
training."

EDUCATION IN A DEMOCRACY 332

responsibilities and to train workers for industry, not to supply the
colleges with freshmen. The high schools should be looked upon as
"people s colleges" and not as the colleges preparatory schools. Demo
cratic principles, they thought, demanded much greater consideration
for the needs of the children who did not go to college. Regard for these
needs and a due respect for the principles of child development de
manded that the ideal of "mastery" be dropped, and that youth should
be free to test and sample and select among subjects, deriving from
some what they could retain and use, and passing on to others. To
hold children rigorously to the pursuit of particular subjects would
only increase the danger of their dropping out of school.

A number of historical forces were working in favor of the new-
educators. Business, when it was favorably disposed to education,
tended to applaud and encourage what they were doing. The sheer
weight of growing student numbers increased the appeal of their
arguments. Their invocation of democratic principles, which were
undergoing a resurgence after 1890, struck a responsive chord in the
public. The colleges themselves were so numerous, so competitive, so
heterogeneous in quality that in their hunger for more students they
were far from vigilant in upholding the admissions standards of the
past. They were, moreover, still uncertain about the value of their
own inherited classical curriculum, and had been experimenting since
about 1870 with the elective system and a broader program of studies.
College and university educators were no longer vitally interested in
the problems of secondary education, and reformers in that field were
left with little authoritative criticism or opposition. The staffs of high
schools were increasingly supplied by the new state teachers colleges;
and high-school textbooks, once written by college authorities in their
fields, were now written by public-school superintendents, high-school
principals and supervisors, or by students of educational methods.

The slight concession made by the Committee of Ten to new schools of
thought was hardly enough to allay discontent. It had not been able to
foresee the extraordinary growth of the high-school population which
would soon occur or the increasing heterogeneity of the student body.
It quickly became evident that the curricular views of the Committee
of Ten were losing ground. By 1908, when the N.E.A. was fast growing

The Road to Life Adjustment

in size and influence, it adopted a resolution repudiating the notion
that public high schools should be chiefly ^fitting schools" for colleges
(which, to be sure, had not been the contention of the Committee of
Ten), urging that the high schools "be adapted to the general needs,
both intellectual and industrial, of their students," and suggesting that
colleges and universities too should adapt their courses to such needs. 8
The balance was tipping: the high schools were no longer to be ex
pected to suit the colleges; instead, the colleges ought to try to resem
ble or accommodate the high schools.

In 1911, a new committee of the N.E.A., the Committee of Nine on
the Articulation of High School and College, submitted another report,
which shows that a revolution in educational thought was well on its
way. The change in personnel was itself revealing. Gone were the emi
nent college presidents and distinguished professors of the 1893 report;
gone, too, were the headmasters of elite secondary schools. The chair
man of the Committee of Nine was a teacher at the Manual Training
High School of Brooklyn, and no authority on any basic academic
subject matter was on his committee, which consisted of school super
intendents, commissioners, and principals, together with one professor
of education and one dean of college faculties. Whereas the Committee
of Ten had been a group of university men attempting to design cur
ricula for the secondary schools, the new Committee of Nine was a
group of men from public secondary schools, putting pressure through
the N.E.A. on the colleges: "The requirement of four years of work in
any particular subject, as a condition of admission to a higher institu
tion, unless that subject be one that may properly be required of all
high-school students, is illogical and should, in the judgment of this
committee, be immediately discontinued."

The task of the high school, the Committee of Nine argued, "was to
lay the foundations of good citizenship and to help in the wise choice of
a vocation," but it should also develop unique and special individual
gifts, which was "quite as important as the development of the common
elements of culture." The schools were urged to exploit the dominant
interests "that each boy and girl has at the time." The committee
questioned the notion that liberal education should precede the voca
tional: "An organic conception of education demands the early intro
duction of training for individual usefulness, thereby blending the
liberal and the vocational. . . ." It urged much greater attention to the
8 N.E.A. Proceedings, 1908, p. 39-

EDUCATION IN A DEMOCRACY 334

role of mechanic arts, agriculture, and "household science** as rational
elements in the education of all boys and girls. Because of the tradi
tional conception of college preparation, the public high schools were 9

responsible for leading tens of thousands of boys and girls away
from the pursuits for which they are adapted and in which they
are needed, to other pursuits for which they are not adapted and
in which they are not needed. By means of exclusively bookish
curricula false ideals of culture are developed. A chasm is created
between the producers of material wealth and the distributors
and consumers thereof.

By 1918 the "liberation" of secondary education from college ideals
and university control seems to have been consummated., at least on the
level of theory, even if not yet in the nation s high-school curricula. In
that year the N.E.A/s Commission on the Reorganization of Secondary
Education formulated the goals of American schools in a document
about which Professor Edgar B. Wesley has remarked that "probably
no publication in the history of education ever surpassed this little five
cent thirty-two page booklet in importance." a This statement, Cardinal
Principles of Secondary Education, was given a kind of official en
dorsement by the United States Bureau of Education, which printed
and distributed an edition of 130,000 copies. It became the occasion of
a nation-wide discussion of educational policy, and some teacher-
training institutions regarded it so highly that they required their pu
pils to memorize essential portions (thus violating a central canon of
the new educational doctrines ) .

The new commission pointed out that more than two thirds of those
who entered the four-year high school did not graduate and that, among
those -who did, a very large proportion did not go to college. The needs
of these pupils must not be neglected. The old concept of general
intellectual discipline as an aim of education must be re-examined.
Individual differences in capacities and attitudes needed more atten
tion. New laws of learning must be brought to bear to test subject
matter and teaching methods; these could no longer be judged "pri
marily in terms of the demands of any subject as a logically organized

9 "Report of the Committee of Nine on the Articulation of High School and
College," N.E.A. Proceedings, 1911, pp. 559-61.
1 Wesley: op. cit., p. 75.

335 The Road to Life Adjustment

In short, the inner structure of various disciplines was to be
demoted as an educational criterion and supplanted by greater defer
ence to the laws of learning, then presumably being discovered.

Moreover, the child was now conceived not as a mind to be de
veloped but as a citizen to be trained by the schools. The new educators
believed that one should not be content to expect good citizenship as a
result of having more informed and intellectually competent citizens
but that one must directly teach citizenship and democracy and civic
virtues. The commission drew up a set of educational objectives in
which neither the development of intellectual capacity nor the mastery
of secondary academic subject matter was even mentioned. It was
the business of the schools, the commission said, to serve democracy by
developing in each pupil the powers that would enable him to act as a
citizen. "It follows, therefore, that worthy home-membership, voca
tion, and citizenship demand attention as three of the leading objec
tives." The commission went on: "This Commission, therefore, regards
the following as the main objectives of education: i. Health. 2,. Com
mand of fundamental processes. [It became clear in context that this
meant elementary skills in the three ITs, in which the commission, no
doubt quite rightly, felt that continued instruction was now needed at
the secondary level,] 3. Worthy home-membership. 4. Vocation.
5. Citizenship. 6. Worthy use of leisure. 7. Ethical character .*"

With justice, the commission argued that the traditional high school
had done too little to encourage interests in music, art, and the drama
but instead of presenting these as a desirable supplement to an intel
lectually ordered curriculum, it offered them as an alternative. The
high school, it said, "has so exclusively sought intellectual discipline
that it has seldom treated literature, art, and music so as to evoke right
emotional response and produce positive enjoyment.** Moreover, the
high school placed too much emphasis on intensive pursuit of most
subjects. Studies should be reorganized so that a single year of work in
a subject would be "of definite value to those who go no further." This
would make the courses "better adapted to the needs both of those who
continue and of those who drop out of school."

The commission further argued that the colleges and universities
should follow the example of the secondary schools in considering
themselves obliged to become mass institutions and to arrange their

2 Quotations in this and the following paragraph are from Cardinal Principles of
Secondary Education, passim.

Er>trcATiON IN A DEMOCRACY 336

offerings accordingly. "The conception that higher education should be
limited to the few is destined to disappear in the interests of democ
racy," it said prophetically. This meant, among other things, that high-
school graduates should be able to go on to college not only with
liberal but with vocational interests, and that, once in college, they
should still be able to take whatever form of education they can which
affords "profit to themselves and to society." In order to accommodate
larger numbers, colleges and universities should supplant academic
studies to some degree with advanced vocational education. The com
mission urged that all normal children should be encouraged to stay in
school, on full time if possible, to the age of eighteen.

The commission quite reasonably urged that the high-school curri
culum should be differentiated to offer a wide range of alternatives;
but its way of expressing this objective was revealing:

The basis of differentiation should be, in the broad sense of the
term, vocational, thus justifying the names commonly given, such
as agricultural, business, clerical, industrial, fine-arts, and house
hold-arts curriculums. Provision should be made also for those
having distinctively academic interests and needs.

Provision should be made also. This reference to the academic side of
the high school as being hardly more than incidental to its main pur
poses captures in a phrase how far the dominant thinking on the
subject had gone in the quarter century since the report of the Com
mittee of Ten.

The rhetoric of the commission s report made it clear that the mem
bers thought of themselves as recommending not an educational retreat
but rather an advance toward the realization of democratic ideals. The
report is breathless with the idealism of the Progressive era and the
war with the hope of making the educational world safe for democ
racy and bringing a full measure -of" opportunity to every child. Our
secondary education, the commission argued, "must aim at nothing less
than complete and worthy living for all youth" thus far had education
gone beyond such a limited objective as developing the powers of the
mind. Secondary-school teachers were urged to "strive to explore
the inner meaning of the great democratic movement now struggling
for supremacy." While trying to develop the distinctive excellences of
individuals and various groups, the high school "must be equally
zealous to develop those common ideas, common ideals, and common

337 The Road to Life Adjustment

modes of thought, feeling, and action, whereby America, through a
rich, unified, common life, may render her truest service to a world
seeking for democracy among men and nations/*

* 4

The Cardinal Principles of Secondary Education, which set the tone
and expressed the ideas current in all subsequent quasi-official state
ments on secondary-educational policy down to the life-adjustment
movement, appeared in the midst of a focal change in the dimensions
of the high-school population. Standing at 1.1 million in 1910, it rose
swiftly to 4.8 million in 1930. When the document itself was published,
all states had adopted compulsory education laws Mississippi, in
1918, being the last to straggle into line.

The schools, moreover, had been coping for some years, and were to
continue to cope for many years more, -with the task of educating the
children of that vast tidal wave of immigration that had come into the
country between 1880 and the First World War, By 1911, for example,
57-5 P 01 * cent of the children in the public schools of thirty-seven of the
largest cities were of foreign-born parentage.? The immigrant children,
now entering secondary schools, brought the same problems of class, of
language, of Americanization that they had brought to the primary
schools. Giving such children cues to American life, and often to ele
mentary hygiene, seemed more important to many school superintend
ents than developing their minds along the lines of the older education;
and it is not difficult to understand the belief that a thorough ground
ing in Latin was not a primary need, say, of a Polish immigrant s child
in Buffalo. Immigrant parents, unfamiliar with American ways, were
inadequate guides to what their children needed to know, and the
schools were now thrust into the parental role. Moreover, the children,
exposed to Yankee schoolmarms in the morning, were expected to be
come instruments of Americanization by bringing home in the after
noon instructions in conduct and hygiene that their parents would take
to heart. Against this background one may better understand the em
phasis of the Cardinal Principles on "worthy home-membership,"
**health/* and "citizenship." The common complaint that the modern
school tries to assume too many of the functions of other social agencies,

3 See, on this general subject, Alan M. Thomas, Jr.: "American Education and
the Immigrant," Teachers College Record, Vol. LV (October, 1953-May, i954)>
pp.

EDUCATION IN A DEMOCRACY 338

including the family, derives in good measure from the response of
educators to this problem.

Changes in professional education also favored new views of second
ary education. The normal schools, which had been at best a land of
stop-gap in teacher education, were now being replaced by teachers
colleges and schools of education. Both the business of training teachers
-and the study of the educational process were becoming specialized
and professional. Unfortunately, as Lawrence Cremin has observed,
the schools of education and the teachers* colleges grew up with a high
degree of autonomy. 4 Increasingly, the mental world of the profes
sional educationist became separated from that of the academic
scholar. The cleavage between Teachers College and the rest of
Columbia University which led to the quip that isoth Street is the
widest street in the world became symbolic of a larger cleavage in the
structure of American education. Professional educators were left to
develop their ideas without being subjected to the intellectual disci
pline that might have come out of a dialogue with university scholars.
In sharp contrast to the days of Eliot, academicians scornfully turned
away from the problems of primary and secondary education, which
they now saw as the preoccupation of dullards; too many educationists
were happy to see them withdraw, leaving the educationists free to
realize their own credos in making plans for the middle and lower
schools/!

At the time the ideas of the Cardinal Principles were supplanting
those of the Committee of Ten, a new kind of educational orthodoxy
was taking form, founded in good part upon appeals to "democracy"
and "science." John Dewey was the master of those for whom educa
tional democracy was the central issue; Edward Lee Thorndike of
those for whom it was the application to education of "what science
tells us." It was not commonly believed that there was any problem in
this union of democracy and science, for a widespread conviction ex
isted (not shared, it must be said, by Thorndike) that there must be a
kind of pre-established harmony between them that since both are
good, both must serve the same ends and lead to the same conclusions;
that there exists, in fact, a kind of science of democracy. 5

Concerning the use, or misuse, as it may be, of Dewey s ideas, I

4 The Transformation of the School ( New York, 1961 ), p. 176.

5 For a witty analysis of the same blend of science and democracy in recent
American political thought, see Bernard Crick: The American Science of Politics
(London, 1959).

339 The Road to Life Adjustment

shall have something to say in the next chapter. Here it is important,
however, to say a word about the use of the techniques of testing and
the various kinds of psychological and educational research. Much of
this research was, of course, valuable, though of necessity tentative.
The difficulty was that what should have been simply a continuous in
quiry had a way, in the fervent atmosphere of professional education,
of being exalted into a faith not so much by those who were actually
doing research as by those who were hungry to find its practical appli
cations and eager to invoke the authority of science on behalf of their
various crusades! The American mind seems extremely vulnerable to
the belief that any alleged knowledge which can be expressed in
figures ^s in fact as final and exact as the figures in which it is ex
pressed. Army testing in the First World War is a case in point. It was
very quickly and very "widely believed that the Army Alpha tests had
actually measured intelligence; that they made it possible to assign
mental ages; that mental ages, or intelligence as reported by tests, are
fixed; that vast numbers of Americans had a mental age of only four
teen; and that therefore the educational system must be coping with
hordes of more or less backward children. 6 Although such overconfident
interpretations of these tests were never without sharp critics among
them John Dewey the misuse of tests seems to be a recurrent factor
in American education. Of course, the credence given to the low view
of human intelligence that some people derived from the tests could
lead to quite different conclusions. To those not enchanted by the Am
erican democratic credo and Edward Lee Thorndike himself was
among them the effect of mental testing was to encourage elitist
views. 7 But for those whose commitment to "democratic" values was
imperturbable, the supposed discovery of the mental limitations of the
masses only encouraged a search for methods and content in educa
tion that would suit the needs of the intellectually mediocre or un-
motivated. Paraphrasing Lincoln, the educators-for-democracy might
have said that God must love the slow learners because he made so
many of them. Elitists might coldly turn their backs on these large
numbers, but democratic educators, embracing them as a fond mother
embraces her handicapped child, would attempt to build the cur
riculum upon their supposed needs.

6 See the good brief account of the early impact of testing in Cremin: The
Transformation of the School, pp. 185-92-.

7 See, for example, Merle Curti s discussion of the views of Thorndike in The
Social Ideas of American Educators ( New York, 1935 ), chapter 14.

EDUCATION IN A DEMOCRACY 340

It is impossible here to stress too ranch the impetus given to the
new educational creed by the moral atmosphere of Progressivism, for
this creed was developed in an atmosphere of warm philanthropy and
breathless idealism in which the needs of the less gifted and the under
privileged commanded a generous response. Educators had spent many
years discovering a canon and a creed, whose validity seemed now
more certain than ever because it seemed to be vindicated morally by
the needs of democracy and intellectually by the findings of science.
More frequently than ever, the rallying cries of this creed were heard
in the land: education for democracy, education for citizenship, the
needs and interests of the child, education for all youth. There is an
element of moral overstrain and a curious lack of humor among Ameri
can educationists which will perhaps always remain a mystery to those
more worldly minds that are locked out of their mental universe. The
more humdrum the task the educationists have to undertake, the
nobler and more exalted their music grows. When they see a chance
to introduce a new course in family living or home economics, they
begin to tune the fiddles of their idealism. When they feel they are
about to establish the school janitor s right to be treated with respect,
they grow starry-eyed and increase their tempo. And when they are
trying to assure that the location of the school toilets will be so clearly
marked that the dullest child can find them, they grow dizzy with ex
altation and launch into wild cadenzas about democracy and self-
realization.

\ 1 The silly season in educational writing had now opened. The prof es-
sibnalization of education put a premium upon the sober treatment of
every mundane problem, and the educators began to indulge in
solemn and pathetic parodies of the pedantry of academic scholarship.
Not liking to think of themselves as mere advocates of low-grade
utilities, they began to develop the art of clothing every proposal, no
matter how simple, common-sense, and sound, in the raiments of the
most noble social or educational objectives. Was it desirable, for ex
ample, for the schools to teach children something about safety? If so,
a school principal could read a pretentious paper to the N.E.A., not on
the important but perhaps routine business of teaching children to be
careful, but on the exalted theme, "The Value of Instruction in Acci
dent Prevention as a Factor in Unifying the Curriculum." It had now
become possible to pretend that the vital thing was not to keep young
sters from getting burnt or hit by vehicles but that teaching them about
such things infused all learning with higher values although in this

343- The Road to Life Adjustment

case, at least, the speaker conceded, in closing: "Let me say that in
struction in accident prevention serves not only to unify the curriculum
but also to reduce accidents.** 8

5

A traveler from a foreign country -whose knowledge of American
education was confined to the writings of educational reformers might
well have envisaged a rigid, unchanging secondary-school system
chained to the demands of colleges and universities, fixed upon old
ideas of academic study, and unreceptive to the wide variety of pupils
it had in charge. The speaker at the N.EA. meeting of 1920 who
lamented that the high schools were still "saturated with college re
quirement rules and standards 79 and filled with principals and teach
ers "trained in academic lore and possessing only the academic view
point" 9 sounded a note of complaint that has never ceased to echo in
the writings of the new educationists. In fact, the innovators had very
considerable success in dismantling the old academic curriculum of the
high school. It is hard for an amateur, and perhaps even a professional
in education, to know how much of this was justified. But two things it
does seem possible to assert: first, that curricular change after 1910 was
little short of revolutionary; and second, that by the 1940*5 and 1950*8
the demands of the life-adjustment educators for the destruction of the
academic curriculum had become practically insatiable.

The old academic curriculum, as endorsed by the Committee of Ten,
reached its apogee around 1910. In that year more pupils were studying
foreign languages or mathematics or science or English any one of
these than all non-academic subjects combined. During the following
forty-year span the academic subjects offered in the high-school cur
ricula fell from about three fourths to about one fifth. Latin, taken in
1910 by 49 per cent of public high-school pupils in grades 9 to 12, fell
by 1949 to 7.8 per cent. All modern-language enrollments fell from
84.1 per cent to 22 per cent. Algebra fell from 56.9 per cent to 26.8 per
cent, and geometry from 30.9 per cent to 12.8 per cent; total mathe
matics enrollments from 89.7 per cent to 55 per cent. Total science
enrollments, if one omits a new catch-all course entitled "general
science/* fell from 81.7 per cent to 33.3 per cent; or to 54.1 per cent if
general science is included. English, though it almost held its own in

8 N.EA. Proceedings., 1920, pp. 2045.

9 Ibid., 1920, pp. 73-5-

EDUCATION IN A DEMOCRACY

purely quantitative terms, was much diluted in many school systems.
The picture in history and social studies is too complex to render in
figures, but changing enrollments made it more parochial both in space
and in time that is, it put greater stress on recent and American
history, less on the remoter past and on European history. 1

When the Committee of Ten examined the high-school curricula in
1893, it found that forty subjects were taught, but since of these thirteen
were offered in very few schools, the basic curriculum was founded on
twenty-seven subjects. By 1941 no less than 2,74 subjects were offered,
and only 59 of these could be classified as academic studies. What is
perhaps most extraordinary is not this ten-fold multiplication of sub
jects, nor the fact that academic studies had fallen to about one fifth the
number, but the response of educational theorists: they were con
vinced that academic studies \vere still cramping secondary education.
In the life-adjustment movement, "which flourished in the late 1940*5
and the 1950*5 with the encouragement of the United States Office of
Education, there occurred an effort to mobilize the public secondary-
school energies of the country to gear the educational system more
closely to the needs of children who -were held to be in some sense
uneducable. 2

1 John F. Latimer, in What s Happened to Our High Schools?, has made a useful
compilation of Office of Education statistics, and I have followed his presentation of
the data; see especially chapters 4 and 7. It is important to note that enrollments
thus put in percentages are not meant to conceal the fact that, with the immense
growth in the high-school population, a larger number of the nation s youth could
be studying some of these academic subjects even though a smaller portion of the
high-school population was pursuing them. However, from 1933 to *939 there oc
curred for the first time a drop not merely in the percentages of students studying
certain subjects but in the absolute enrollments as well.

The consequences in one field, which happens to have been well surveyed,
might be examined. During the Second World War the problems of secondary-
school education in mathematics became a matter of some official concern. In 1941
the Naval Officers Training Corps reported that, of 4,200 candidates who were
college freshmen, sixty- two per cent failed the arithmetic reasoning test. Only
twenty-three per cent had had more than one and a half years of mathematics in
high school. Later, a 1954 survey reported that sixty-two per cent of the nation s
colleges had found it necessary to teach high-school algebra to entering freshmen.
See L L. Kandel: American Education in the Twentieth Century (Cambridge,
Mass., 1957), p. 62; and H. S. Dyer, R. Kalin, and F. M. Lord: Problems in Mathe
matical Education (Princeton, 1956), p. 2,3. Many high schools appear to have been
approaching the view, widespread among life-adjustment theorists, that foreign
languages, algebra, geometry, and trigonometry have "relatively little value except
as college preparation or except for a few college curricula/* and that "therefore
most of the instruction in those fields should be postponed until college/ Harl R.
Douglass: Secondary Education for Life Adjustment of American Youth (New-
York, 1952), p. 598.

2 The term "uneducable" is, of course, not used by life-adjustment educators. It
is my translation of what one is asserting about a youth in secondary school when

343 27^ Road to Life Adjustment

To some degree the life-adjustment movement was a consequence of
the crisis in the morale of American youth -which has been observable
since the Second World War, But it was more than this: it was an at
tempt on the part of educational leaders and the United States Office
of Education to make completely dominant the values of the crusade
against intellectualism that had been going on since 1910. Looking at
the country s secondary education shortly after the end of the Second
World War, John W. Studebaker, then Commissioner of Education,
observed that only about seven youths out of ten were entering senior
high school (grades 10 to 12), and that fewer than four remained to
graduate, 3 Despite the efforts made in the preceding forty years to in
crease the "holding power" of the schools, large numbers of youngsters
were still uninterested in completing their secondary education. The
effort to enrich the academic curriculum seemed to have failed in one
of its main purposes; the suggestion was now made that the cur
riculum had not been enriched enough.

The life-adjustment movement proposed to remedy the situation by
stimulating ~the development of programs of education more in har
mony with life-adjustment needs of all youth/* This would be done by
devising an education "which better equips all American youth to live
democratically with, satisfaction to themselves and profit to society as
home members, workers, and citizens / /At a national conference held
in Chicago in May, 1947, the conferees adopted a resolution drafted by
Dr. Charles A. Prosser, the director of Dunwoody Institute of Min
neapolis, an agency of industrial education. In its original form (it was
later slightly reworded in order "to avoid misinterpretation and mis
understanding" ), this resolution expressed the belief of the members

one says that lie can neither absorb an academic education nor learn a desirable
trade.

3 Life Adjustment Education for Even/ youth (Washington, n d. [1948?]), p.
in. This publication was issued by the Office of Education of the Federal Security
Agency and was prepared in the Division of Secondary Education and the Division
of Vocational Education, For the Prosser resolution and other statements of pur
pose in this repetitive document, cited in the following paragraphs, see pp. 2-5,
i5n., i8n., 22, 48-52 ,8890, and passim.

At the same time that the Office of Education was sponsoring life adjustment, the
President s Commission on Higher Education -was advocating, in its report of 947,
that the colleges themselves should no longer select "as their special clientele
persons possessing verbal aptitudes and a capacity for grasping abstractions,"*
and that they should give more attention to cultivating other aptitudes "such as
social sensitivity and versatility, artistic ability, motor skill and dexterity, and
mechanical aptitude and ingenuity." Higher Education for American Democracy:
A Report of the President s Commission on Higher Education, Vol. I (Washington,
1947 ) P- S*.

EDUCATION IN A DEMOCRACY 344

of the conference that the needs of the great majority of American
youth were not being adequately served by secondary schools. Twenty
per cent of them, it was said, were being prepared for college; another
twenty per cent for skilled occupations. But the remaining sixty per
cent, according to spokesmen for the crusade, were unfit for either of
these programs and should be given education for life adjustment. The
life-adjustment theorists were explicit about the qualities they at
tributed to the neglected sixty per cent who needed life-adjustment
education. These were mainly children from unskilled and semi
skilled families who had low incomes and provided a poor cultural
environment. They began school later than others, continued to be
retarded in school, made low grades, scored lower on intelligence and
achievement tests, lacked interest in school work, and were "less
emotionally mature nervous, feel less secure."

After having compiled this depressing list of the traits of their
clientele, the authors of the Office of Education s first manual on Life
Adjustment went on to say that "these characteristics are not intended
to brand the group as in any sense inferior/ The peculiar self-defeating
version of "democracy" entertained by these educators somehow made
it possible for them to assert that immature, insecure, nervous, retarded
slow learners from poor cultural environments were "in no sense in
ferior" to more mature, secure, confident, gifted children from better
cultural environments. 4 This verbal genuflection before "democracy"
seems to have enabled them to conceal from themselves that they were,
with breathtaking certainty, writing off the majority of the nation s
children as being more or less uneducable that is, in the terms of
the Prosser resolution, unfit not just for the academic studies that pre
pare for college but even for programs of vocational education leading
to "desirable skilled occupations." What kind of education would be
suitable for this unfortunate majority? Certainly not intellectual de
velopment nor cumulative knowledge, but practical training in being
family members, consumers, and citizens. They must be taught the

4 That the capacities of such a large proportion of American youth should be so
written off in the name of "democracy" is one of the more perplexing features of the
movement. At least one of its supporters, however, faced up to its implications wnen
he said that this neglected group lacks "aroused interests or pronounced aptitudes/
but that this fact is "probably fortunate for a society having a large number of jobs
to be done requiring no unusual aptitudes or interests." Edward K. Hankin: "The
Crux of Life Adjustment Education/" Bulletin of the National Association of Sec
ondary-School Principals (November, 1953), p. 72. This is a possible point of view
and a more realistic assessment of the implications of life-adjustment education. But
it is hardly "democratic."

345 The Road to Life Adjustment

terms would have been familiar to any reader of the Cardinal Princi
ples "ethical and moral living"; home and family life; citizenship; the
uses of leisure; how to take care of their health; "occupational adjust
ment." Here, as the authors of Life Adjustment Education for Every
Youth put it, was "a philosophy of education which places life values
above acquisition of knowledge." The conception, implicit in this ob
servation, that knowledge has little or nothing to do with life values,"
was an essential premise of the whole movement Repeatedly, life ad
justment educators were to insist that intellectual training is of no use
in solving the "real life problems " of ordinary youth.

The thinking behind the life-adjustment movement is difficult to ex
hume from the repetitive bulletins on the subject compiled by the Of
fice of Education in Washington. But before the movement had been
so named, its fundamental notions had been set forth by Dr. Prosser
himself, an experienced administrator in vocational education, when he
delivered his Inglis Lecture at Harvard University in 1939- 5 Although
there are in the published lecture occasional traces of the influence of
John Dewey s passion for educational democracy, Prosser relied mainly
upon psychological research, and he expressed a more fundamental
piety for the findings of "science." ( Life-adjustment educators would do
anything in the name of science except encourage children to study it. )
Thorndike and his followers had shown, Prosser imagined, that there is
no such thing as intellectual discipline whose benefits can be trans
ferred from one study, situation, or problem to another. ^Nothing could
be more certain than that science has proven false the doctrine of
general education and its fundamental theory that memory or imagina
tion or the reason or the will can be trained as a power." When this
archaic notion is abandoned, as it must be, all that is left is education
in various specifics. There is no such thing as general mechanical skill;
there are only specific skills developed by practice and use. It is like
wise with the mind. There is, for example, no such thing as the
memory; there are only specific facts and ideas which have become
available for recall because we have found use for them.

Contrary, then, to what had been believed by exponents of the older

5 Secondary Education and Life (Cambridge, Mass., 1939). The argument sum
marized in this and the following pages is largely in pp. 149; especially pp. 7-10,
15-16, 19-^1, 3i~5, 47-9-

EDUCATION IN A DEMOCRACY 346

concept of education as the development of intellectual discipline, there
are no general mental qualities to be developed; there are only specific
things to be known. The usability and teachability of these things go
hand in hand; the more immediately usable an item of knowledge is,
the more readily it can be taught. The value of a school subject can be
measured by the number of immediate, actual life situations to which it
directly applies. The important thing, then, is not to teach pupils how to
generalize, but to supply them directly with the information they need
for daily living for example, to teach them, not physiology, but how
to keep physically fit. The traditional curriculum consists simply of
studies that once were useful in this way but have ceased to be so. "The
general rule seems to be that the younger any school study, the greater
is its utilitarian value in affairs outside the schoolroom, and the older
the study, the less the usefulness of its content in meeting the real de
mands of living." Students learn more readily and retain more of what
they learn when the transfer of content from school to life is immediate
and direct. It is, in fact, the very usefulness of a subject that determines
its disciplinary value to the mind. "On all these counts business arith
metic is superior to plane or solid geometry; learning ways of keeping
physically fit, to the study of French; learning the technique of select
ing an occupation, to the study of algebra; simple science of everyday
life, to geology; simple business English, to Elizabethan Classics/

It was an irresistible conclusion drawn from scientific research, said
Prosser, that the best teaching material is "the life-adjustment and not
the education-for-more education studies." Why, then, had the col
leges and universities persisted in fastening unusable and unteachable
traditional subjects on the secondary schools? Quite aside from the
vested interests of teachers of these subjects, the main reason, he
thought, was that the higher institutions had needed some device for
selecting the abler pupils and eliminating the others. (The teaching of
such subjects as languages and algebra had the function, one must
believe, not of educating anyone, but simply of acting as hurdles that
would trip up weaker pupils before they got to college.) This out
moded technique required four wasteful and expensive years of futile
study in supposedly "disciplinary" subjects. The selection of pupils
suited to college, Prosser thought, could now be made with infinitely
more economy and accuracy in a few hours of mental testing. Perhaps,
then, traditionalists, "as a sporting proposition/ could be persuaded to
drop at least half the academic curriculum for all students and keep
only a few of the older studies in proportion to their surviving useful-

347 The Road to Life Adjustment

ness. On this criterion, "all foreign languages and all mathematics
should be dropped from the list of required college-preparatory
studies" in favor of the more usable subjects physical science, English,
and social studies.

Many new studies of direct-use value should be added to the cur
riculum: English of a severely practical kind, offering "communication
skills"; literature dealing with modern life; science ( only "qualitative"
science) courses that would give youth "the simple science of every
day life," tell "how science increases OUT comfort . . . promotes our
enjoyment of life . . . helps men get their work done . . . increases
wealth"; practical business guidance and "simple economics for youth,"
supplemented perhaps by material on the "economic history of youth
in the United States"; civics, focusing on "civic problems of youth"
and on the local community; mathematics, consisting only of varieties
of applied arithmetic; social studies, giving attention to "wholesome
recreation in the community," amenities and manners, uses of leisure,
social and family problems of youth, and the "social history of youth in
the United States"; finally, of course, "experiences in the fine arts," and
"experiences in the practical arts," and vocational education. In this
way, the curriculum could be made to conform to the laws of learning
discovered by modern psychological science, and all children would
benefit to a much greater degree from their secondary schooling. 6

In a rather crude form Prosser had here given expression to the con
clusion drawn by many educationists from experimental psychology,
that "science," by destroying the validity of the idea of mental disci
pline, had destroyed the basic assumption upon which the ideal of a
liberal education was based. Prosser had this in mind when he as
serted with such confidence that "nothing could be more certain" than
that science had proven false the assumptions of general education.
Behind this remarkable dogmatism there lies an interesting chapter in
the history of ideas. The older ideal of a classical liberal education, as
expressed in nineteenth-century America and elsewhere, had been
based upon two assumptions. The first was the so-called faculty
psychology. In this psychology, the mind was believed to be a substan
tive entity composed of a number of parts or "faculties" such as rea
son, imagination, memory, and the like. It was assumed that these
faculties, like physical faculties, could be strengthened by exercise; and

6 For a later, full-scale, authoritative statement of the views of this school on the
content of the curriculum, see Harold Alberty: Reorganizing the High School Cur
riculum ( New York, 1953 )

EDUCATION IN A DEMOCRACY 348

in a liberal education, through constant mental discipline, they were
gradually so strengthened. It was also generally believed that certain
subjects had an established superiority as agents o mental discipline
above all, Latin, Greek, and mathematics. The purpose of developing
competence in these subjects was not merely to lay the foundation for
learning more Latin, Greek, or mathematics, but, far more important,
to train the powers of the mind so that they would be more adequate
for whatever task they might confront. 7

In good time it was found that the faculty psychology did not hold
up under philosophic analysis or the scientific study of the functions of
mind. Moreover, with the immense growth in the body of knowledge
and the corresponding expansion of the curriculum, the old confidence
that the classical languages and mathematics had an exclusive place of
honor in mental discipline seemed more and more a quaint parochial
conceit. 8

But most modern psychologists and educational theorists were aware
that the decline of the faculty psychology and the classical-
mathematical curriculum did not in itself put an end to the question
whether such a thing as mental discipline is a realizable end of educa
tion. If mental discipline were, after all, meaningless, everything that
had been done in the name of liberal education for centuries seemed
to have been based on a miscalculation. The question whether the
mind can be disciplined, or generally trained, survived the faculty
psychology and took on a new, more specific form: can training exer
cised and developed in one mental operation develop a mental facility
that can be transferred to another? This general question could, of
course, be broken down into endless specific ones: can acts of memori
zation (as William James asked in an early rudimentary experiment
conducted on himself) facilitate other memorization? Can training in
one form of sensory discrimination enhance other discriminations? Can

7 The classic statement in America of this view of mental discipline was the
Yale Report of 1828, which originally appeared in The American Journal of Science
and Arts., Vol. XV (January, 1829), pp. 297351. It is largely reprinted in Hofstad-
ter and Smith, eds.: American Higher Education: A Documentary History,
Vol. I, pp. 275-91.

8 It was also a conceit that served to justify a good deal of inferior pedagogy.
There is overwhelming evidence, for example, that the classical languages were
taught in the old-time college in a narrow grammarian s spirit, and not as a means of
introducing students to the cultural Me of classical antiquity. See Richard Hofstad-
ter and Walter P. Metzger: The Development of Academic Freedom in the United
States (New York, 1955), PP- 226-30; Richard Hofstadter and C. DeWitt Hardy:
The Development and Scope of Higher Education in the United States (New
York, 1952), chapter i and pp. 53-6.

349 The Road to Life Adjustment

the study of Latin facilitate the subsequent study of French? If a trans
fer of training did occur, a cumulation of such transfers over several
years of a rigorous liberal education might produce a mind which was
better trained in general. But if transfer of training did not take place,
most of the cumulative academic studies were quite pointless outside
the items of knowledge contained in these studies themselves.

At any rate, in the confidence that they could throw light on a
question of central importance, experimental psychologists, spurred by
Thorndike, began early in the twentieth century to seek experimental
evidence on the transfer of training. Anyone -who reads an account of
these experiments might well conclude that they were focused on
such limited aspects of the problem that they were pathetically in
adequate; individually and collectively, they did not shed very much
light on the grand question to which they were ultimately directed.
However, as a consequence of a great many ingenious and often in
teresting experiments, evidence of a kind did begin to accumulate.
Some of it, notably in two papers published by Thorndike in 1901
and 1924, was taken by educational thinkers to be decisive evidence
against transfer of training in any degree considerable enough to vindi
cate the idea of mental discipline. This and similar evidence from other
researchers was, in any case, seized upon by some educational theorists.
As W. C. Bagley once remarked: "It was inevitable that any theory
which justified or rationalized the loosening of standards should be re
ceived with favor," by those who, without deliberate intent, distorted
experimental findings in the interest of their mission to reorganize the
high schools to accommodate the masses. 9

Actually the accumulating experimental evidence proved contradic
tory and confusing, and those educators who insisted that its lessons
were altogether clear and that nothing was so certain as what it
yielded were simply ignoring all findings that did not substantiate their
views. Their misuse of experimental evidence, in fact, constitutes a
major scandal in the history of educational thought. If a quantitative
survey of the experiments means anything, these educators ignored the
bulk of the material, for four of five of the experimental studies showed
the presence of transfer under certain conditions. There seems to have
been no point at which the preponderant opinion of outstanding ex
perimental psychologists favored the anti-transfer views that were
drawn upon by educationists like Prosser as conclusive on what

9 W. C. Bagley: "The Significance of the Essentialist Movement in Educational
Theory," Classical Journal, Vol. XXXIV ( 1939), p. 336.

EDUCATION IN A DEMOCRACY 350

"science has proven." Today, experimental psychology offers them no
comfort. As Jerome Bruner summarizes it in his remarkable little book,
The Process of Education: "Virtually all of the evidence of the last two
decades on the nature of learning and transfer has indicated that . . .
it is indeed a fact that massive general transfer can be achieved by
appropriate learning, even to the degree that learning properly under
optimum conditions leads one to learn how to learn/ " 1 Presumably,
the ideal of a liberal education is still better vindicated by the educa
tional experience of the human race than by experimental psychology;
but in so far as such scientific inquiry is taken as a court of resort, its
verdict is vastly more favorable to the views of those who believe in
the possibility of mental discipline than it was represented to be by the
educational prophets of life adjustment.

* 7 "

The life-adjustment movement stated, in an extreme form, the proposi
tion toward which professional education had been moving for well
over four decades: that in a system of mass secondary education, an
academically serious training is an impossibility for more than a modest
fraction of the student population. In setting the portion of uneducables
with dogmatic certainty at sixty per cent, the spokesmen of this move
ment were taking such a strong position that some of their critics as
sumed the figure to be altogether arbitrary. Its source appears again to
have been a touching faith in "science." In 1940, when Dr. Prosser, as a
member of the National Youth Administration, was in close touch with
Washington s view of the problems of youth, the psychologist, Lewis M.
Terman, well known for his work in intelligence testing, estimated in a
publication of the American Youth Commission, How Fare American
Youth?., that an IQ of no is needed for success in traditional, classical,
high-school curricula, and that sixty per cent of American youth rank
below this IQ level. There is, in any case, a great discrepancy between
this figure and the arithmetic of the life-adjustment educators. 2 But
more important is the irresponsibility of trying to base the educational

1 Jerome S. Bruner: The Process of Education (Cambridge, Mass., 1960), p. 6.
The important consideration, as Bruner points out, is that the learner have a struc
tural grasp of the matter which is learned. For the modern discussion of mental
discipline and a brief review of the history of the experimental evidence, see
Walter B. Kolesnik: Mental Discipline in Modern Education (Madison, 1958),
especially chapter 3.

2 That is, if Terman s findings are accepted, sixty per cent of American youth
might be unfit for an academic high-school curriculum; but of these surely some

35 * The Road to Life Adjustment

policy of an entire nation on any such finding. Psychologists do not
agree (and were still heatedly debating in 1939) whether an individ
ual s IQ is a permanently fixed genetic attribute; and there is now im
pressive experimental evidence that an individual IQ, given appropriate
attention and pedagogy, can often be raised by 15 to 20 points or
more. (Results can be particularly impressive when special attention
is given to underprivileged children. In New York City s "Higher
Horizons" program, many slum children with slightly subnormal or
nearly retarded IQ s at the junior high-school level had both their IQ s
and their academic performance raised so that they were acceptable
in college and some even earned scholarships.) Moreover, the IQ
alone would, in no case, be an infallible index to the ceiling of anyone s
potential educational achievement; there are other variables, amenable
to change, which it does not take into account, such as the caliber of
teaching, the amount of schoolwork, and the pupil s morale and motiva
tion. Psychologists and educators are far from being in precise agree
ment as to the proportion of the students in our high schools who, even
with today s teaching and low educational morale, can profit from an
academic curriculum. 3

Finally, the plausibility of the life-adjustment movement s view o
the educability of the country s youth hinged upon ignoring secondary-
educational accomplishments in other countries. It had become a
commonplace argument of the new educationists that secondary cur
ricula of the countries of Western Europe, being "aristocratic," class-
bound, selective, and traditional, had no exemplary value for the
democratic, universal, and forward-looking secondary education of the
United St